the discipline that studies the principles of transmiting information and the methods by which it is delivered (as print or radio or television etc.); "communications is his major field of study"
(computer science) the area of the screen in graphical user interfaces against which icons and windows appear
a person's social heritage: previous experience or training; "he is a lawyer with a sports background"
information that is essential to understanding a situation or problem; "the embassy filled him in on the background of the incident"
the part of a scene (or picture) that lies behind objects in the foreground; "he posed her against a background of rolling hills"
relatively unimportant or inconspicuous accompanying situation; "when the rain came he could hear the sound of thunder in the background"
extraneous signals that can be confused with the phenomenon to be observed or measured; "they got a bad connection and could hardly hear one another over the background signals"
understate the importance or quality of; "he played down his royal ancestry"
the dialect of Chinese spoken in Beijing and adopted as the official language for all of China
a somewhat flat reddish-orange loose skinned citrus of China
a high public official of imperial China
any high government official or bureaucrat
a member of an elite intellectual or cultural group
shrub or small tree having flattened globose fruit with very sweet aromatic pulp and thin yellow-orange to flame-orange rind that is loose and easily removed; native to southeastern Asia
people in general (often used in the plural); "they're just country folk"; "folks around here drink moonshine"; "the common people determine the group character and preserve its customs from one generation to the next"
the act of populating (causing to live in a place); "he deplored the population of colonies with convicted criminals"
(statistics) the entire aggregation of items from which samples can be drawn; "it is an estimate of the mean of the population"
a group of organisms of the same species populating a given area; "they hired hunters to keep down the deer population"
the people who inhabit a territory or state; "the population seemed to be well fed and clothed"
the number of inhabitants (either the total number or the number of a particular race or class) in a given place (country or city etc.); "people come and go, but the population of this town has remained approximately constant for the past decade"; "the African-American population of Salt Lake City has been increasing"