communication
noun
Communication — whatever passes between minds, carrying meaning across
Definition
Something that is communicated by or to or between people or groups
In depth
Communication is anything conveyed by, to, or between people or groups, the broad category encompassing speech, writing, gesture, and every other means by which meaning travels from one mind toward another. The word names both the act of conveying and, often, the message itself, the content successfully or unsuccessfully transmitted.
Origin
The word descends from Latin communicare, to share or make common, from communis, common or shared. That root sense of making something common between people remains the word's essential logic: every act of communication is, at bottom, an attempt to make a private thought into shared, common ground.
Usage examples
"Their entire marriage, the counselor suggested, had quietly broken down over a long failure of communication."
"The ancient inscriptions remain a form of communication whose intended audience died out millennia ago."
"Animals achieve remarkable feats of communication without ever sharing a single word of human language."
How to use it
Communication is broadly applicable across nearly every field, from technology to relationships to linguistics, and writers should generally favor specifying the form of communication — letter, glance, silence — when precision and image matter more than abstraction.
Related concepts
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