Other forms: cultures
Culture is the art, food, beliefs, and habits that one people shares. Local culture, culture shock, popular culture.
The word does two very different jobs — the arts on one hand and a whole way of life on the other — and arguments about it usually turn on which is meant. Company culture is what people actually do rather than what the values poster says. In a laboratory, a culture is grown deliberately. Note that the Latin means tilling.
1nouncultureThe shared art, beliefs and habits of a people.
“In some cultures, it's rude to eat with your left hand.”
2noungrownSomething grown deliberately in a laboratory.
“The lab grew a culture of the bacteria to find out which drug would kill it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
culture is a shared way of life.
Latin cultura means cultivation, from colere, to till or worship. Agriculture, colony and cult come from the same tilling.
Latin
cultūra
Middle French
culture
English, today
culture
Built from
From Middle French culture, from Latin cultūra. From Middle French culture (“cultivation; culture”), from Latin cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, to grow, worship”) (related to colōnus and colōnia), from Proto-Indo-European kʷel- (“to move; to turn (around)”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA