Noun

(en noun)

A cohesive whole built up of distinct parts.

* {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham)

, title=(The China Governess) , chapter=1 citation , passage=The original family who had begun to build a palace to rival Nonesuch had died out before they had put up little more than the gateway, so that the actual structure which had come down to posterity retained the secret magic of a promise rather than the overpowering splendour of a great architectural achievement.}}

The birds had built an amazing structure out of sticks and various discarded items.

The underlying shape of a solid.

He studied the structure of her face.

The overall form or organization of something.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-03

, author= , title=Pixels or Perish , volume=100, issue=2, page=106 , magazine= citation , passage=Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure , astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.}}

The structure of a sentence.

The structure of the society was still a mystery.

A set of rules defining behaviour.

For some, the structure of school life was oppressive.

(computing)  Several pieces of data treated as a unit.

This structure contains both date and timezone information.

(fishing, uncountable)  Underwater terrain or objects (such as a dead tree or a submerged car) that tend to attract fish

There's lots of structure to be fished along the west shore of the lake; the impoundment submerged a town there when it was built.

A body, such as a political party, with a cohesive purpose or outlook.

The South African leader went off to consult with the structures .

(logic)  A set along with a collection of finitary functions and relations.

Noun

(en noun)

(zoology) Any member of the infraorder Hystricognathi of rodents, distinguished from other rodents by the bone structure of their skulls.

* 1996 , José Roberto Moreira, David W. Macdonald, 7: Capybara use and conservation in South America'', V.J. Taylor, N. Dunstone (editors) ''Exploitation of Mammal Populations , page 89,

The New World hystricognath rodents (= caviomorphs) today represent one of the most diverse and widespread suborders among the over 800 mammal species of South America (Woods, 1982).

* 2008 , Felipe Bandoni de Oliveira, Eder Cassola Molina, Paul A. Garber, Gabriel Marroig, Chapter 3: Paleogeography of the South Atlantic: a Route for Primates and Rodents into the New World?'', Alejandro Estrada, Julio Cesar Bicca-Marques, Eckhard W. Heymann, Karen B. Strier (editors), ''South American Primates , page 63,

The situation is similar with respect to rodents, given that the earliest undisputed hystricognaths are from the Oligocene of Pakistan and Egypt (ca. 35Ma), with the possibility of a Middle Eocene origin for the group (Bryant and McKenna 1995; Marivaux et al. 2002).

* 2009 , Michael J. Benton, Vertebrate Palaeontology , page 359,

The hystricognaths' include several lines that radiated in Africa and South America in the Oligocene and Miocene.The largest ' hystricognath group is the Caviomorpha, the South American guinea pigs, capybaras, chinchillas and New World porcupines.