invention
Pluralinventions
- 1A new device, process, or idea that someone has created and that did not exist before.
The printing press was an invention that transformed how knowledge spread.
Many household inventions began as solutions to everyday frustrations.
Similarinnovation, creation, contrivance, device, breakthrough
Note
Beyond gadgets, the word covers anything made up, including stories that are not true. "It was all the housekeeper's invention" means she imagined or fabricated the burglar. The range of things called inventions is wide: The Economist's 2013 list of British inventions runs from the steam engine to football and Worcestershire sauce. Context decides whether an invention is something to admire or something to disbelieve.
- 2The act or process of devising and creating something that did not previously exist.
The invention of the printing press revolutionized communication.
Necessity often drives the invention of clever solutions.
Similarcreation, development, devising, origination, conception
Note
Here the word names the deed rather than the thing itself, and it usually takes of plus what was made: the invention of the printing press, the invention of eyeglasses. Older writing on art used it more narrowly. Roland Fréart de Chambray's "Of Invention," in John Evelyn's 1668 translation, makes it the painter's first task: framing a noble idea upon the subject one would paint.
- 3The mental power to come up with original ideas and create new things.
Her novels are praised for their wit and invention.
The project demanded real invention from the whole team.
Similarcreativity, imagination, originality, ingenuity, inspiration
- 4A short, self-contained musical composition, especially one of J.S. Bach's two- and three-part keyboard pieces.
The pianist opened the recital with a delicate two-part invention.
Each invention explores a single musical idea from start to finish.
Note
The genre name is largely Bach's own. George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1880) thought Bach probably the only composer to use it. Bach used it for fifteen small pieces in two parts and fifteen in three, each developing a single idea, and Grove likened them to the later Impromptu. Capitalized, it names Bach's sets; lowercase, it names a single piece, as in the inventions in C minor.
Less common meaning
- 5The act of finding something out or discovering it; a discovery.
The feast commemorates the invention of the holy relic beneath the church.
His diaries describe the invention of a freshwater spring deep in the forest.
Note
The sense closest to the Latin: invenire meant "to come upon, find," from in- and venire, "to come." To invent was first to discover what already existed. That makes old prose easy to misread, because "the invention of truth" means finding the truth out, not making it up. Use this sense only in historical or deliberately archaic writing, where the context shows that discovery is meant.
Practice
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Origin
The word came through Middle English invencion, from Latin inventiō, either directly or by way of Middle French invencion. It goes back to Latin invenīre ("to discover, find, invent"), formed from in- ("in, into") plus venīre ("to come"). It replaced the native Old English word orþanc.