label
Plurallabels
Verblabels
Plurallabels
Formslabels
- 1A small ticket or sign attached to an object, giving information about it.
The shipping label listed the recipient's address and the package weight.
He peeled the label off the bottle before recycling it.
Note
The word began as cloth. Middle English label meant a narrow band or strip of cloth, from Old French label and ultimately from a Frankish word for a torn rag. Today it is the thing stuck or tied on that carries words: a price, care instructions, an address. English also lets a label speak: the label says a scarf must not be machine-washed, and the label priced the poster at three pounds.
- 2A name applied to someone or something to categorize them as part of a particular social group.
Critics resented the 'sellout' label pinned on the band after their hit single.
Society is quick to attach labels like 'genius' or 'failure' to young people.
Similarcategory
- 3To attach a small ticket or sign to something in order to mark or identify it.
Workers label every crate with its destination before loading the truck.
The museum labeled each artifact with its date and origin.
Note
The literal act behind the word, which reaches back through Middle English to a narrow strip of cloth. American spelling keeps a single l before an ending, as in labeled and labeling, while British spelling doubles it. Things are labeled with what they carry: a date, a price, a destination. When the thing labeled is a person or an idea, the verb has moved into the categorizing sense.
- 4To give a name to a person or thing in order to categorize them.
Teachers should be careful not to label struggling students as failures.
Reviewers labeled the film a masterpiece within hours of its release.
Similarbrand, call, dub, classify, categorize
Note
Categorizing takes two patterns. One uses as: unfairly labeled as a cheat, label it clearly as a masterpiece. The other drops it: labeled Clinton part of the neoconservative wing. The verb often carries a note of complaint, and "unfairly labeled" is a natural phrase. It suits talk about other people's judgments better than neutral description.
- 5A company in the music industry that sells records.
The label dropped three artists after the merger.
Independent labels often take creative risks that the major ones avoid.
Note
In the music business it is short for record label and is the everyday word there. Bands are signed to a label, a label drops artists, and independent labels set themselves against the majors. The company signs performers, pays for recording, and handles the manufacture, distribution and marketing of what they make.
- 6A non-interactive interface element that displays text, often describing the purpose of another control.
The form's labels guide users through each required field.
A developer added a label above the dropdown to clarify its purpose.
Similarcaption
Note
On screen, a label displays text but cannot be clicked or typed into. Its usual job is to sit beside an input field or dropdown and say what that control is for. Binding the two together also improves accessibility, since the field can then be identified by its label.
- 7A small strip, especially of paper or parchment (sometimes a piece fixed to parchment to carry the seal), but also of iron, brass, land, and similar materials.
A narrow label of brass ran along the edge of the wooden chest.
Each charter bore a label of parchment to which the seal was fixed.
Note
This sense stays closest to the word's roots in strips of cloth, the story told under the everyday ticket. In Romeo and Juliet, a hand must not become "the label to another deed": the parchment strip that carries a seal. Jeremy Taylor's grave is bound with labels of iron, and Fuller stands on the last label of his land. The strip can even be flesh, hanging in "collops and labels."
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- 9In medieval and later art, a depicted band or scroll bearing an inscription.
A label unfurling from the angel's hand bore the words of the annunciation.
Heraldic painters often added labels to identify the figures in a scene.
Note
Art historians pair the word with scroll and banner for the painted or carved band that carries words inside a picture. Medieval artists set such text and image in overlapping but separate spaces. David Glover and Scott McCracken's Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction (2012) traces the word balloon back through George Cruikshank's "labels" or "banners" to the inscribed scroll of medieval art.
- 10A programmer-defined name that stands in for a numeric value, working as the inverse of an enumeration.
The programmer defined a label for each error number to make the source readable.
Instead of writing the raw value, refer to its label in the lookup table.
Similaridentifier, name
Note
Programmers use the word for a readable name that stands in for a number. Storage devices, for instance, can be called up by label or by ID. The direction matters: an enumeration starts from names and assigns them numbers, while a label starts from an existing number and gives it a name. Keep it apart from a jump target in code, which names a place rather than a value.
- 11A named point in source code that a GOTO or similar instruction can jump to.
Each label gives the GOTO statement a fixed place to jump to.
He marked the retry point with a label near the start of the function.
Note
Here the name marks a position, not a value. The label sits at a line of code, and a GOTO or similar branching instruction sends control straight to it. Reaching the label does nothing in itself, because it is only a destination. The collocations follow from that: you jump to a label, branch to a label, or mark a retry point with one.
- 12To replace specific atoms with their isotope so the isotope's presence or movement can be tracked through a reaction, metabolic pathway, or cell.
Like tagging migrating birds so researchers can follow their routes across continents.
By labeling the glucose with carbon-14, the team could trace its path through the metabolic cycle.
Biochemists label individual amino acids to follow how cells assemble new proteins.
Note
In this laboratory sense the label is no longer a ticket but an atom. The swapped-in isotope may be radioactive or stable, and the molecule carrying it can then be followed by autoradiography or mass spectrometry. Chemists speak of a compound labeled with carbon-14, or of a carbon-14-labeled compound. Compare the broader biological sense, where a detectable substance is added rather than an atom replaced.
- 13To attach a detectable substance to a biological material so that the combination can be tracked, whether inside a living system or in the lab.
Technicians label the antibodies with a fluorescent tag before imaging.
By labeling the virus with a marker, scientists can watch it enter the cell.
Note
Biologists label with something added: a fluorescent tag on an antibody, or a marker on a virus. The marker may be temporary or permanent, and the pair can be tracked in situ or in vitro. The verb often pairs with the next step, as when Nature Methods writes of reagents used to "label and image a protein within tissue."
- 14A projecting molding running along the sides and over the tops of openings in medieval architecture.
A weathered label arches over each window of the cathedral's west front.
Restorers traced the original label along the doorway's sides and top.
Similardripstone
Note
The molding works against weather as much as it decorates. Projecting around the opening, it throws rainwater clear of the masonry below. Its carved ends have a name of their own: Marilyn Stokstad's Medieval Art (2018) notes that sculptured ends of labels are called label-stops. That is the term to look for when a description singles out the terminals of a window or door molding.
- 15A heraldic charge shaped like a strap crossing a horse's chest, with short pendants hanging from it.
The prince's arms carry a white label of three points across the chief.
Heralds draw the label spanning the upper part of the shield.
Note
Its spelling keeps a trace of French. The heraldic synonym lambel matches the Old French lambel behind the whole word. The label is drawn as a horizontal band with pendants hanging from it, and it is conventionally a mark of cadency, borne by an eldest son while his father is living. Heralds call its pendants points, as in a label of three points.
- 16A brass rule fitted with sights, once used together with a circumferentor to measure altitudes.
The surveyor swung the label until both sights framed the church spire.
With the label clamped to the circumferentor, she read off the altitude.
Note
Surveying once had its own label. The circumferentor was an early surveyor's compass, and the label was the sighted brass rule mounted on it. The surveyor aligned both sights on a high or distant point and read off its altitude. The word turns up only in accounts of older instruments and older practice.
- 17A tassel; a hanging tuft of cords or threads used as a decoration.
Note
The word no longer means this, and the sense survives only in older prose. Thomas Fuller, writing before 1662, describes the arms of France hanging by a label on an oak. Read it there as a hanging ornament or fastening, not as a written ticket, and keep the sense for discussing historical texts.
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Practice
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Origin
It comes from Middle English label, meaning a narrow band or strip of cloth, borrowed from Old French label or lambel. That in turn came from Frankish *lappā, a torn piece of cloth, from Proto-Germanic and ultimately a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "blade," related to Old High German lappa and Old English læppa.