civilization
Pluralcivilizations
UK spellingcivilisation
- 1An organized way of life shared across many communities, often a whole nation or people, or a particular social, political, or technical system or stage of development.
Mesopotamian civilization developed irrigation, written law, and dense urban centers.
Trade routes spread ideas and technologies between centers of civilization across the ancient world.
Note
Two grammars share this sense. With an article, and freely in the plural, it names one culture among others: the Aztec civilization, or civilizations that rise and fall, in William Irwin Thompson's phrase of 1981. Without an article it names a tradition or a stage taken whole, as in Western civilization or modern civilization. Choose the countable form when you could list rivals, and drop the article when you mean an inheritance.
- 2Human society in general, especially organized civil society.
After three weeks in the backcountry, the hikers welcomed the return to civilization.
Some writers worry that prolonged war could unravel civilization itself.
Similarsociety
Oppositewilderness, barbarism
Note
Here civilization is less a culture than a place you leave and come back to. It is the settled world set against the wilderness or the hermit's retreat, as in being glad to be back in civilization. It never takes an article or a plural in this use. The -s- spelling that Rollo Ahmed uses in The Black Art (1936) keeps the shape of the French civilisation.
- 3The condition of being civilized in manners and way of life.
Her tact and restraint lent an air of civilization to the heated negotiations.
Victorian critics measured a nation's civilization by its arts and public institutions.
Similarrefinement, sophistication, civility, cultivation, culture
Note
A quality that a single person can possess, and in degree: a man of great civilization is cultivated and humane, not a member of an empire. Read this way, civilization is the result of the civilizing process. It sits comfortably with adjectives of amount such as great, little or real, and the phrase "a man of great civilization" sounds slightly old-fashioned and formal.
- 4The act or process of civilizing a people, or of becoming civilized.
Roman officials presented the conquest of Gaul as the civilization of an untamed frontier.
Reformers believed education, not force, was the surest path to the civilization of the colonies.
Note
The word's construction shows plainly in this sense: civilize plus -ation, an action noun like education or organization. It usually takes an of-phrase naming who is being civilized, as in the civilization of the child or of a frontier. That object is the surest way to tell it from the culture meaning. Without the of-phrase, a reader will usually hear a society rather than a process.
Less common meaning
- 5The act of converting a criminal proceeding into a civil one.
Defense counsel moved for the civilization of the proceedings, preferring damages to the gallows.
The parties sought civilization of the suit so the dispute could be resolved by private settlement.
Note
A legal coinage built on civil in its courtroom sense, civil + -ization, meaning to make a case civil rather than criminal. It has nothing to do with culture or manners. The sense is obsolete, so a modern reader will meet it only in old legal writing. Do not use it for converting proceedings today, because any reader will hear the cultural meaning first.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from French "civilisation", equivalent to "civilize" plus "-ation" (or "civil" plus "-ization").