Noun

(uncountable) The practical aspects of a given art, occupation etc.; formal requirements.

* 1924 , HE Wortham, A Musical Odyssey , p. 97:

Brahms, after realizing that the technique of the piano was developing along mistaken lines, and his own danger of stereotyping his style, keeps away from it for most of his middle age [...].

* {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=July-August, author= Catherine Clabby

, magazine=(American Scientist), title= Focus on Everything , passage=Not long ago, it was difficult to produce photographs of tiny creatures with every part in focus. That’s because the lenses that are excellent at magnifying tiny subjects produce a narrow depth of field. A photo processing technique called focus stacking has changed that.}}

(uncountable) Practical ability in some given field or practice, often as opposed to creativity or imaginative skill.

* 2011 , "Bhimsen Joshi", The Economist , 3 Feb 2011:

Yet those who packed concert halls to listen to him sing, as Indians did for over six decades, rarely mentioned his technique .

(label) a method of achieving something or carrying something out, especially one requiring some skill or knowledge.

* 2011 , Paul Lewis & Matthew Taylor, The Guardian , 16 Mar 2011:

They said executives were warned about one technique nicknamed "carpet karaoke", which involved bending deportees over in aircraft seats to silence them.

Noun

(-)

(computing) Encoded computer instructions, usually modifiable (unless stored in some form of unalterable memory such as ROM). Compare hardware.

* 1958 , John W. Tukey, "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics" in The American Mathematical Monthly , vol. 65, no. 1 (Jan. 1958), pp 1-9:

The "software " comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its "hardware" of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.

* 1995 , Paul Niquette, Softword: Provenance for the Word ‘Software’ :

As originally conceived, the word "software " was merely an obvious way to distinguish a program from the computer itself. A program comprised sequences of changeable instructions each having the power to command the behavior of the permanently crafted machinery, the "hardware."