What is "column"

Column \Col"umn\, n. [L. columna, fr. columen, culmen, fr. cellere (used only in comp.), akin to E. excel, and prob. to holm. See Holm, and cf. Colonel.]

1. (Arch.) A kind of pillar; a cylindrical or polygonal support for a roof, ceiling, statue, etc., somewhat ornamented, and usually composed of base, shaft, and capital. See Order.

2. Anything resembling, in form or position, a column in architecture; an upright body or mass; a shaft or obelisk; as, a column of air, of water, of mercury, etc.; the Column Vend[^o]me; the spinal column.

3. (Mil.)

   1. A body of troops formed in ranks, one behind the other; -- contradistinguished from line. Compare Ploy, and Deploy.

   2. A small army.

4. (Naut.) A number of ships so arranged as to follow one another in single or double file or in squadrons; -- in distinction from ``line'', where they are side by side.

5. (Print.) A perpendicular set of lines, not extending across the page, and separated from other matter by a rule or blank space; as, a column in a newspaper.

6. (Arith.) A perpendicular line of figures.

7. (Bot.) The body formed by the union of the stamens in the Mallow family, or of the stamens and pistil in the orchids.

8. (Print.) one of a series of articles written in a periodical, usually under the same title and at regular intervals; it may be written and signed by one or more authors, or may appear pseudonymously or anonymously, as an editorial column. ``Safire's weekly column On Language in the New York Times is usually more interesting (and probably more accurate) than his political column.''
   --P. Cassidy

   Attached column. See under Attach, v. t.

   Clustered column. See under Cluster, v. t.

   Column rule, a thin strip of brass separating columns of type in the form, and making a line between them in printing.

mid-15c., "vertical division of a page," also "a pillar, post," from Old French colombe (12c., Modern French colonne "column, pillar"), from Latin columna "pillar," collateral form of columen "top, summit," from PIE root *kel- (4) "to project, be prominent" (see hill). Sense of "matter written for a newspaper" dates from 1785.

n. 1 (context architecture English) A solid upright structure designed usually to support a larger structure above it, such as a roof or horizontal beam, but sometimes for decoration. 2 A vertical line of entries in a table, usually read from top to bottom. 3 A body of troops or army vehicles, usually strung out along a road. 4 A body of text meant to be read line by line, especially in printed material that has multiple adjacent such on a single page. 5 A unit of width, especially of advertisements, in a periodical, equivalent to the width of a usual column of text. 6 (label en by extension) A recurring feature in a periodical, especially an opinion piece, especially by a single author or small rotating group of authors, or on a single theme. 7 Something having similar vertical form or structure to the things mentioned above, such as a spinal column.

1. n. a line of (usually military) units following one after another

2. a vertical glass tube used in column chromatography; a mixture is poured in the top and washed through a stationary substance where components of the mixture are adsorbed selectively to form colored bands [syn: chromatography column]

3. a linear array of numbers one above another

4. anything tall and thin approximating the shape of a column or tower; "the test tube held a column of white powder"; "a tower of dust rose above the horizon"; "a thin pillar of smoke betrayed their campsite" [syn: tower, pillar]

5. an article giving opinions or perspectives [syn: editorial, newspaper column]

6. a vertical structure standing alone and not supporting anything (as a monument or a column of air) [syn: pillar]

7. (architeture) a tall cylindrical vertical upright and used to support a structure [syn: pillar]

A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression member. The term column applies especially to a large round support (the shaft of the column) with a capital and a base or pedestal and made of stone, or appearing to be so. A small wooden or metal support is typically called a post, and supports with a rectangular or other non-round section are usually called piers. For the purpose of wind or earthquake engineering, columns may be designed to resist lateral forces. Other compression members are often termed "columns" because of the similar stress conditions. Columns are frequently used to support beams or arches on which the upper parts of walls or ceilings rest. In architecture, "column" refers to such a structural element that also has certain proportional and decorative features. A column might also be a decorative element not needed for structural purposes; many columns are "engaged", that is to say form part of a wall.

The column, or technically the gynostemium, is a reproductive structure that can be found in several plant families: Aristolochiaceae, Orchidaceae, and Stylidiaceae.

It is derived from the fusion of both male and female parts ( stamens and pistil) into a single organ. This means that the style and stigma of the pistil, with the filaments and one or more anthers, are all united.

A column is a recurring piece or article in a newspaper, magazine or other publication, where a writer expresses his/her own opinion in few columns allotted to him by the newspaper organisation. Columns are written by columnists.

What differentiates a column from other forms of journalism is that is a regular feature in a publication – written by the same writer or reporter and usually on the same subject area or theme each time – and that it typically, but not universally, contains the author's opinion or point of view.

A column is a vertical structural element in architecture.

Column may also refer to:

• Column (botany) or gynostemium, a part of an orchid
• Column (database), a set of data values of a particular type in a relational database
• Column (formation), a military formation
• Columns (juggling), a juggling pattern
• Column (periodical), a recurring piece or article written by a columnist
• Column (typography), a vertical block of text positioned on a page
• Column vector, an m × 1 matrix in linear algebra
• Column, stalagnates (columns) in speleothems (cave formations) where stalactites merge with stalagmites
• Columns (video game), a puzzle video game
• "Columns" (How I Met Your Mother), a 2007 episode of How I Met Your Mother
• Flying column, a combined arms independent military formation of a temporary nature

A military column is a formation of soldiers marching together in one or more files in which the file is significantly longer than the width of ranks in the formation. The column formation allowed the unit rapid movement, a very effective charge (due to weight of numbers) or it could quickly form square to resist cavalry attacks, but by its nature only a fraction of its muskets would be able to open fire.

The previously prevalent formation, the line, offered a substantially larger musket frontage allowing for greater shooting capability but required extensive training to allow the unit to move over ground as one while retaining the line.

It is also applied by modern armies to vehicles, troops and naval vessels.

In typography, a column is one or more vertical blocks of content positioned on a page, separated by gutters (vertical whitespace) or rules (thin lines, in this case vertical). Columns are most commonly used to break up large bodies of text that cannot fit in a single block of text on a page. Additionally, columns are used to improve page composition and readability. Newspapers very frequently use complex multi-column layouts to break up different stories and longer bodies of texts within a story. Column can also more generally refer to the vertical delineations created by a typographic grid system which type and image may be positioned. In page layout, the whitespace on the outside of the page (bounding the first and last columns) are known as margins; the gap between two facing pages is also considered a gutter, since there are columns on both sides. (Any gutter can also be referred to as a margin, but exterior and horizontal margins are not gutters.)

A column of a distributed data store is a NoSQL object of the lowest level in a keyspace. It is a tuple (a key-value pair) consisting of three elements:

• Unique name: Used to reference the column
• Value: The content of the column. It can have different types, like AsciiType, LongType, TimeUUIDType, UTF8Type among others.
• Timestamp: The system timestamp used to determine the valid content.