# artefact

Pronunciation: UK say "AH-ti-fakt" /ˈɑːtɪfækt/; US say "AHR-ti-fakt" /ˈɑɹtɪfækt/

## Noun

1. An object such as a tool, weapon or ornament that is valued for what it reveals about the past, especially one found at an archaeological dig or held in a museum.
   - Simple: An old object made by people, such as a tool or a pot, that tells us about life in the past.
   - _Archaeologists recovered more than two thousand artefacts from the Iron Age settlement, including brooches and spearheads._
   - _Each artefact is photographed and labelled before it leaves the trench._
2. Any object made or shaped by human hands or human effort; in some uses, an object shaped by any maker, such as a tool made by an animal.
   - Simple: Something made or shaped by people, such as a tool, a pot or a building, or sometimes by an animal.
   - _The researchers treated the booking website as a designed artefact, studying how customers moved through it._
   - _Designers spend hours watching how people handle everyday artefacts such as kettles and door handles._
3. A noticeable distortion in an image, video or audio recording, produced by lossy compression, another imprecise processing method, or physical interference while the signal is captured.
   - Simple: A fault you can see or hear in an image, video or sound, caused by shrinking the file, processing or interference.
   - _Streaming at a low bit rate leaves compression artefacts in dark scenes, where the shadows break up into blocks._
   - _The radiologist recognised the bright streak as an artefact caused by the patient's metal filling._
4. Something regarded as the product of human action or thought rather than as a natural or built-in part of things.
   - Simple: Something that exists because people made it or thought of it, not because it is natural.
   - _Many borders in the region are artefacts of colonial treaties rather than natural divisions between peoples._
   - _The critic argued that the notion of a normal childhood is a cultural artefact shaped by the Victorians._
5. A result or feature that comes from the way something was studied, tested or prepared, such as the method, the equipment or the treatment of a specimen, rather than from the thing itself.
   - Simple: A result that comes from the way a test or study was done, not from the thing being studied.
   - _The apparent rise in cases may simply be an artefact of the new, more sensitive test._
   - _Researchers warned that the gap between the two groups could be a statistical artefact rather than a real difference._
6. Short for build artifact: one of the files a compilation process produces for deployment and use.
   - Simple: Short for build artifact: a file that is made when computer code is built, ready to be used.
   - _The pipeline keeps each artefact from the nightly build for thirty days._
   - _Before the release, she checked that the artefacts on the server matched the ones the testers had signed off._

## Origin

English took it from Italian artefatto, which joins two Latin words. One is arte ("by skill"), the ablative of ars ("art"); the other is factum ("thing made"), from facio ("to make, do").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/artefact (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).