artifact

Plural: artifacts

Noun

• An object made by a human being, of cultural interest.
• a man-made object taken as a whole
• An object made or shaped by human hand or labor.
• An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
• Something viewed as a product of human agency or conception rather than an inherent element.
• A finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.
• An object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.
• An appearance or structure in protoplasm due to death, the method of preparation of specimens, or the use of reagents, and not present during life.
• A perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or an image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact processing algorithm or of physical interference in an acquisition process.
• Ellipsis of build artifact.
• Any object in the collection of a museum. May be used sensu stricto only for human-made objects, or may include ones that are not human-made.

Examples

• He treasured the old wooden Scrabble set like a precious artifact.
• The dig produced many Roman artifacts.
• The opacity in his chest radiograph turned out to be an artifact due to the film.
• The spot on his lung turned out to be an artifact of the X-ray process.
• This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has unsightly artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.

Synonyms

artefact, artifact

Antonyms

natural object