Art

Pronunciation

• UK IPA: /ɑːt/
• US IPA: /ɑɹt/
• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)t

Middle English art, from Old French art, from Latin artem, accusative of ars "art". Displaced native Middle English liste ("art") (from Old English list).

Full definition of art

Noun

1. (uncountable) The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colours, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.
   There is a debate as to whether graffiti is art or vandalism.
2. (uncountable) Activity intended to make something special.
3. (uncountable) A re-creation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value judgments.
4. (uncountable) The study and the product of these processes.
5. (uncountable) Aesthetic value.
6. (uncountable, printing) Artwork.
7. (countable) A field or category of art, such as painting, sculpture, music, ballet, or literature.
8. (countable) A nonscientific branch of learning; one of the liberal arts.
• 2013-08-03, Boundary problems, Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.
9. (countable) Skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation.
• 1796, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Folio Society 1985, page 217:A physician was immediately sent for; but on the first moment of beholding the corpse, he declared that Elvira's recovery was beyond the power of art.
• 1898, Winston Churchill, The Celebrity Chapter 4, The Celebrity, by arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at Mohair on an afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the track. The three returned wondering and charmed with Mrs. Cooke; they were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious house.

Synonyms

• (Human effort) creation, grandeur, wonder

Antonyms

• (Human effort) mundacity, nature, subsistence

Derived terms

From Middle English, from Old English eart ("(thou) art"), second-person singular present indicative of wesan, from Proto-Germanic *ar-t ("(thou) art", originally, "(thou) becamest"), second-person singular preterite indicative form of *iranÄ… ("to rise, be quick, become active"), from Proto-Indo-European *er-, *or(w)- ("to lift, rise, set in motion"). Cognate with Faroese ert ("art"), Icelandic ert ("art"), Old English earon ("are"), from the same preterite-present Germanic verb. More at are.

Verb

1. (archaic)

   art

   (archaic second-person singular of be)
   How great thou art!

Anagrams

• rat, RTA, tar