Definition of "culture" []

• The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. (noun)
• These patterns, traits, and products considered as the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population: Edwardian culture; Japanese culture; the culture of poverty. (noun)
• These patterns, traits, and products considered with respect to a particular category, such as a field, subject, or mode of expression: religious culture in the Middle Ages; musical culture; oral culture. (noun)
• The predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning of a group or organization. (noun)
• Intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "(c) The people of the culture farther west, the _north-west culture_, were not Mongols."
• "Here, too, the line of the extant culture, -- the narrow indented boundary of the _culture_ that professed to take all is always defining the new, -- cutting out the wild not yet visited by the art of man; -- only here the criticism is much more lively, because here 'we come _to particulars_,' a thing which the new philosophy -- much insists on; and though this want in learning, and the wildness it leaves, is that which makes tragedies in this method of exhibition; it has its comical aspect also; and this is the laughing and weeping philosopher in one who manages these representations; and in this case it is the comical aspect of the subject that is seized on."
• "But trying to come up with a definition made me realize just how vast and encompassing the term "culture" actually was and how many things together make up the culture of a group or civilization."