culture

n. [ F. culture, L. cultura, fr. colere to till, cultivate; of uncertain origin. Cf. Colony. ] 1. The act or practice of cultivating, or of preparing the earth for seed and raising crops by tillage; as, the culture of the soil. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. The act of, or any labor or means employed for, training, disciplining, or refining the moral and intellectual nature of man; as, the culture of the mind. [ 1913 Webster ]

If vain our toil
We ought to blame the culture, not the soil. Pepe. [ 1913 Webster ]

3. The state of being cultivated; result of cultivation; physical improvement; enlightenment and discipline acquired by mental and moral training; civilization; refinement in manners and taste. [ 1913 Webster ]

What the Greeks expressed by their paidei`a, the Romans by their humanitas, we less happily try to express by the more artificial word culture. J. C. Shairp. [ 1913 Webster ]

The list of all the items of the general life of a people represents that whole which we call its culture. Tylor. [ 1913 Webster ]

4. (Biol.) (a) The cultivation of bacteria or other organisms (such as fungi or eukaryotic cells from mulitcellular organisms) in artificial media or under artificial conditions. (b) The collection of organisms resulting from such a cultivation. The growth of cells obtained from multicellular animals or plants in artificial media is called tissue culture. [ Webster 1913 Suppl. +PJC ]

☞ The word is used adjectively with the above senses in many phrases, such as: culture medium, any one of the various mixtures of gelatin, meat extracts, etc., in which organisms cultivated; culture flask, culture oven, culture tube, gelatin culture, plate culture, etc. [ Webster 1913 Suppl. ]

5. (Cartography) Those details of a map, collectively, which do not represent natural features of the area delineated, as names and the symbols for towns, roads, houses, bridges, meridians, and parallels. [ Webster 1913 Suppl. ]

Culture fluid,
Culture medium a fluid in which microscopic organisms are made to develop, either for purposes of study or as a means of modifying their virulence. If the fluid is gelled by, for example, the use of agar, it then is called, depending on the vessel in which the gelled medium is contained, a plate, a slant, or a stab. [ 1913 Webster +PJC ]