breed animals or plants using parents of different races and varieties; "cross a horse and a donkey"; "Mendel tried crossbreeding"; "these species do not interbreed"
a basic truth or law or assumption; "the principles of democracy"
a rule or law concerning a natural phenomenon or the function of a complex system; "the principle of the conservation of mass"; "the principle of jet propulsion"; "the right-hand rule for inductive fields"
a basic generalization that is accepted as true and that can be used as a basis for reasoning or conduct; "their principles of composition characterized all their works"
a rule or standard especially of good behavior; "a man of principle"; "he will not violate his principles"
acting or arriving or performed exactly at the time appointed; "she expected guests to be punctual at meals"; "he is not a particularly punctual person"; "punctual payment"
a contestant who meets certain requirements and so qualifies to take part in the next stage of competition; "the tournament was won by a late qualifier"
drawing a figure satisfying certain conditions as part of solving a problem or proving a theorem; "the assignment was to make a construction that could be used in proving the Pythagorean theorem"
the act of constructing something; "during the construction we had to take a detour"; "his hobby was the building of boats"
the commercial activity involved in repairing old structures or constructing new ones; "their main business is home construction"; "workers in the building trades"
the creation of a construct; the process of combining ideas into a congruous object of thought
a group of words that form a constituent of a sentence and are considered as a single unit; "I concluded from his awkward constructions that he was a foreigner"
an interpretation of a text or action; "they put an unsympathetic construction on his conduct"