Noun

(en noun)

Expression and exchange of individual ideas through talking with other people; also, a set instance or occasion of such talking.

* 1699 , , Heads designed for an essay on conversations

Study gives strength to the mind; conversation , grace: the first apt to give stiffness, the other suppleness: one gives substance and form to the statue, the other polishes it.

*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=5 , passage=When this conversation was repeated in detail within the hearing of the young woman in question, and undoubtedly for his benefit, Mr. Trevor threw shame to the winds and scandalized the Misses Brewster then and there by proclaiming his father to have been a country storekeeper.}}

* , chapter=12

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill.

(fencing) The back-and-forth play of the blades in a bout.

(obsolete) Interaction; commerce or intercourse with other people; dealing with others.

* 1526 , (William Tyndale), trans. Bible , Acts XI:

Yt chaunsed thatt a whole yere they had their conversacion with the congregacion there, and taught moche people insomoche thatt the disciples off Antioche we the fyrst that wer called Christen.

(archaic) Behaviour, the way one conducts oneself; a person's way of life.

*, New York Review of Books, 2001, p.50:

There are many that take no heed what happeneth to others by bad conversation , and therefore overthrow themselves in the same manner through their own fault, not foreseeing dangers manifest.

(obsolete) Sexual intercourse.

* 1723 , Charles Walker, Memoirs of the Life of Sally Salisbury :

(Ariadne)quitted her Lover (Theseus), for the tumultuous Conversation of (Bacchus).

* 1749 , (Henry Fielding), , Folio Society 1973, p. 333:

The landlady therefore would by no means have admitted any conversation of a disreputable kind to pass under her roof.

(computing) The protocol-based interaction between systems processing a transaction.

Noun

(en noun)

Subject; theme; a category or general area of interest.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= The machine of a new soul , passage=The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what. But how the neurons are organised in these lobes and ganglia remains obscure. Yet this is the level of organisation that does the actual thinking—and is, presumably, the seat of consciousness.}}

(Internet) Discussion thread.

(obsolete) An argument or reason.

* Bishop Wilkins

contumacious persons, who are not to be fixed by any principles, whom no topics can work upon

(obsolete, medicine) An external local application or remedy, such as a plaster, a blister, etc.

(Wiseman)