modification
Pluralmodifications
- 1Altering or adjusting something while preserving its fundamental character, or a change made in this way.
The software update introduced a minor modification to the user interface.
Engineers approved the modification after testing it carefully for safety.
Similarchange, alteration, adjustment, revision
Note
The everyday sense usually takes the preposition to: a modification to the radio's tuning, to a design, to a plan. It also forms fixed labels such as behavior modification, where conduct is the thing being adjusted. The word implies that the original survives the change. When only the outcome is meant, it shifts toward the changed form itself.
- 2
- 3The change a word undergoes when used in a construction, such as 'am' becoming ''m' in 'I'm'.
The modification of 'going to' into 'gonna' reflects how rapid speech reshapes words.
Linguists track each modification a pronoun undergoes when it attaches to a verb.
Note
A linguist's term for what happens to a word inside a phrase. The word itself stays the same in the dictionary, but am shrinks to 'm once it leans on I. Its neighbors cause the change, and that sets it apart from the change a loanword undergoes, where the pressure comes from a new language rather than a new construction.
- 4The change a word undergoes when it is borrowed into another language.
English speakers applied a modification to the German loanword, softening its harsher consonants.
Each language gives a borrowed term its own modification to fit local speech.
Note
Borrowing reshapes words to fit the receiving language. Chinese kòu tóu, written with its tone marks as two syllables, reached English as kowtow, respelled and run together into one word. The term covers changes to sound and spelling alike. It is often counted, as in the modifications a loanword shows, with each adjustment named separately.
- 5A change to an organism caused by its environment that is not passed on to its offspring.
The fish developed a modification in body shape after years in colder water.
Sun exposure produced a modification in skin tone that the man's children did not inherit.
Note
Biology uses the word with a strict limit: the change is real, but it ends with the individual. A tan from sunbathing is the standard case. The body adjusts to its surroundings, and nothing of it passes to the next generation. A biologist who calls a trait a modification is saying that it was acquired, not inherited.
Less common meaning
- 6The particular form of existence belonging to an object or entity; a mode of being.
To the old metaphysicians, a wave was merely a modification of the sea's substance.
He described joy and grief as two modifications of one underlying spirit.
Note
A word from older metaphysics, where a thing's modifications were the particular shapes its underlying substance happened to take. It came through Middle French from Latin modificātiō, "a measuring," and the idea of measuring out or limiting still shows through. Mary Wollstonecraft writes of "the present modification of society" in 1791, meaning society's current form. A modern reader hears "change," so quote this sense rather than use it.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Middle French modification, from Latin modificātiō ('a measuring'), which comes from modificāre ('to limit, control, modify').