What is "field"

Gun \Gun\ (g[u^]n), n. [OE. gonne, gunne; of uncertain origin; cf. Ir., Gael., & LL. gunna, W. gum; possibly (like cannon) fr. L. canna reed, tube; or abbreviated fr. OF. mangonnel, E. mangonel, a machine for hurling stones.]

1. A weapon which throws or propels a missile to a distance; any firearm or instrument for throwing projectiles, consisting of a tube or barrel closed at one end, in which the projectile is placed, with an explosive charge (such as guncotton or gunpowder) behind, which is ignited by various means. Pistols, rifles, carbines, muskets, and fowling pieces are smaller guns, for hand use, and are called small arms. Larger guns are called cannon, ordnance, fieldpieces, carronades, howitzers, etc. See these terms in the Vocabulary.

   As swift as a pellet out of a gunne When fire is in the powder runne.
   --Chaucer.

   The word gun was in use in England for an engine to cast a thing from a man long before there was any gunpowder found out.
   --Selden.

2. (Mil.) A piece of heavy ordnance; in a restricted sense, a cannon.

3. pl. (Naut.) Violent blasts of wind.

   Note: Guns are classified, according to their construction or manner of loading as rifled or smoothbore, breech-loading or muzzle-loading, cast or built-up guns; or according to their use, as field, mountain, prairie, seacoast, and siege guns.

   Armstrong gun, a wrought iron breech-loading cannon named after its English inventor, Sir William Armstrong.

   Big gun or Great gun, a piece of heavy ordnance; hence (Fig.), a person superior in any way; as, bring in the big guns to tackle the problem.

   Gun barrel, the barrel or tube of a gun.

   Gun carriage, the carriage on which a gun is mounted or moved.

   Gun cotton (Chem.), a general name for a series of explosive nitric ethers of cellulose, obtained by steeping cotton in nitric and sulphuric acids. Although there are formed substances containing nitric acid radicals, yet the results exactly resemble ordinary cotton in appearance. It burns without ash, with explosion if confined, but quietly and harmlessly if free and open, and in small quantity. Specifically, the lower nitrates of cellulose which are insoluble in ether and alcohol in distinction from the highest (pyroxylin) which is soluble. See Pyroxylin, and cf. Xyloidin. The gun cottons are used for blasting and somewhat in gunnery: for making celluloid when compounded with camphor; and the soluble variety (pyroxylin) for making collodion. See Celluloid, and Collodion. Gun cotton is frequenty but improperly called nitrocellulose. It is not a nitro compound, but an ester of nitric acid.

   Gun deck. See under Deck.

   Gun fire, the time at which the morning or the evening gun is fired.

   Gun metal, a bronze, ordinarily composed of nine parts of copper and one of tin, used for cannon, etc. The name is also given to certain strong mixtures of cast iron.

   Gun port (Naut.), an opening in a ship through which a cannon's muzzle is run out for firing.

   Gun tackle (Naut.), the blocks and pulleys affixed to the side of a ship, by which a gun carriage is run to and from the gun port.

   Gun tackle purchase (Naut.), a tackle composed of two single blocks and a fall.
   --Totten.

   Krupp gun, a wrought steel breech-loading cannon, named after its German inventor, Herr Krupp.

   Machine gun, a breech-loading gun or a group of such guns, mounted on a carriage or other holder, and having a reservoir containing cartridges which are loaded into the gun or guns and fired in rapid succession. In earlier models, such as the Gatling gun, the cartridges were loaded by machinery operated by turning a crank. In modern versions the loading of cartidges is accomplished by levers operated by the recoil of the explosion driving the bullet, or by the pressure of gas within the barrel. Several hundred shots can be fired in a minute by such weapons, with accurate aim. The Gatling gun, Gardner gun, Hotchkiss gun, and Nordenfelt gun, named for their inventors, and the French mitrailleuse, are machine guns.

   To blow great guns (Naut.), to blow a gale. See Gun, n., 3.

"to go out to fight," 16c., from field (n.) in the specific sense of "battlefield" (Old English). The sports meaning "to stop and return the ball" is first recorded 1823, originally in cricket; figurative sense of this is from 1902. Related: Fielded; fielding.

Old English feld "plain, pasture, open land, cultivated land" (as opposed to woodland), also "a parcel of land marked off and used for pasture or tillage," probably related to Old English folde "earth, land," from Proto-Germanic *felthuz "flat land" (Cognates: Old Saxon and Old Frisian feld "field," Old Saxon folda "earth," Middle Dutch velt, Dutch veld Old High German felt, German Feld "field," but not found originally outside West Germanic; Swedish fält, Danish felt are borrowed from German; Finnish pelto "field" is believed to have been adapted from Proto-Germanic). This is from PIE *pel(e)-tu-, from root *pele- (2) "flat, to spread" (see plane (n.1)). The English spelling with -ie- probably is the work of Anglo-French scribes (compare brief, piece).\n

\nAs "battle-ground," c.1300. Meaning "sphere or range of any related things" is from mid-14c. Physics sense is from 1845. Collective use for "all engaged in a sport" (or, in horse-racing, all but the favorite) is 1742; play the field "avoid commitment" (1936) is from notion of gamblers betting on other horses than the favorite. Cricket and baseball sense of "ground on which the game is played" is from 1875. Sense of "tract of ground where something is obtained or extracted" is from 1859. As an adjective in Old English combinations, often with a sense of "rural, rustic" (feldcirice "country-church," feldlic "rural"). Of slaves, "assigned to work in the fields" (1817, in field-hand), opposed to house. A field-trial originally was of hunting dogs.

n. 1 (senseid en land area free of woodland, cities, and towns; open country)A land area free of woodland, cities, and towns; open country. 2 (senseid en wide, open space used to grow crops or to hold farm animals)A wide, open space that is usually used to grow crops or to hold farm animals. vb. 1 (context transitive sports English) To intercept or catch (a ball) and play it. 2 (context baseball softball cricket and other batting sports English) To be the team catching and throwing the ball, as opposed to hitting it. 3 (context transitive sports English) To place a team in (a game).

1. v. catch or pick up (balls) in baseball or cricket

2. play as a fielder

3. answer adequately or successfully; "The lawyer fielded all questions from the press"

4. select (a team or individual player) for a game; "The Patriots fielded a young new quarterback for the Rose Bowl"

1. n. a piece of land cleared of trees and usually enclosed; "he planted a field of wheat"

2. a region where a battle is being (or has been) fought; "they made a tour of Civil War battlefields" [syn: battlefield, battleground, field of battle, field of honor]

3. somewhere (away from a studio or office or library or laboratory) where practical work is done or data is collected; "anthropologists do much of their work in the field"

4. a branch of knowledge; "in what discipline is his doctorate?"; "teachers should be well trained in their subject"; "anthropology is the study of human beings" [syn: discipline, subject, subject area, subject field, field of study, study, bailiwick, branch of knowledge]

5. the space around a radiating body within which its electromagnetic oscillations can exert force on another similar body not in contact with it [syn: field of force, force field]

6. a particular kind of commercial enterprise; "they are outstanding in their field" [syn: field of operation, line of business]

7. a particular environment or walk of life; "his social sphere is limited"; "it was a closed area of employment"; "he's out of my orbit" [syn: sphere, domain, area, orbit, arena]

8. a piece of land prepared for playing a game; "the home crowd cheered when Princeton took the field" [syn: playing field, athletic field, playing area]

9. extensive tract of level open land; "they emerged from the woods onto a vast open plain"; "he longed for the fields of his youth" [syn: plain, champaign]

10. (mathematics) a set of elements such that addition and multiplication are commutative and associative and multiplication is distributive over addition and there are two elements 0 and 1; "the set of all rational numbers is a field"

11. a region in which active military operations are in progress; "the army was in the field awaiting action"; "he served in the Vietnam theater for three years" [syn: field of operations, theater, theater of operations, theatre, theatre of operations]

12. all of the horses in a particular horse race

13. all the competitors in a particular contest or sporting event

14. a geographic region (land or sea) under which something valuable is found; "the diamond fields of South Africa"

15. (computer science) a set of one or more adjacent characters comprising a unit of information

16. the area that is visible (as through an optical instrument) [syn: field of view]

17. a place where planes take off and land [syn: airfield, landing field, flying field]

Field may refer to:

In agriculture, a field is an area of land, enclosed or otherwise, used for agricultural purposes such as cultivating crops or as a paddock or other enclosure for livestock. A field may also be an area left to lie fallow or as arable land.

Many farms have a field border, usually composed of a strip of shrubs and vegetation, used to provide food and cover necessary for the survival of wildlife. It has been found that these borders may lead to an increased variety of animals and plants in the area, but also in some cases a decreased yield of crops.

FIELD magazine is a twice-yearly literary magazine published by Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and focusing on contemporary poetry and poetics.

FIELD has published spring and fall issues each year since its founding in 1969. Contributors have included Adrienne Rich, Charles Wright, Thomas Lux, and Franz Wright.

The field is a mineral deposit containing a metal or other valuable resources in a cost-competitive concentration. It is usually used in the context of a mineral deposit from which it is convenient to extract its metallic component. The deposits are exploited by the mines in the case of solid mineral deposits ( iron type, coal ...) extraction wells in case of mineral fluids (such as oil, gas, brines).

In mathematics, a field is one of the fundamental algebraic structures used in abstract algebra. It is a nonzero commutative division ring, or equivalently a ring whose nonzero elements form an abelian group under multiplication. As such it is an algebraic structure with notions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division satisfying the appropriate abelian group equations and distributive law. The most commonly used fields are the field of real numbers, the field of complex numbers, and the field of rational numbers, but there are also finite fields, algebraic function fields, algebraic number fields, p-adic fields, and so forth.

Any field may be used as the scalars for a vector space, which is the standard general context for linear algebra. The theory of field extensions (including Galois theory) involves the roots of polynomials with coefficients in a field; among other results, this theory leads to impossibility proofs for the classical problems of angle trisection and squaring the circle with a compass and straightedge, as well as a proof of the Abel–Ruffini theorem on the algebraic insolubility of quintic equations. In modern mathematics, the theory of fields (or field theory) plays an essential role in number theory and algebraic geometry.

As an algebraic structure, every field is a ring, but not every ring is a field. The most important difference is that fields allow for division (though not division by zero), while a ring need not possess multiplicative inverses; for example the integers form a ring, but 2x = 1 has no solution in integers. Also, the multiplication operation in a field is required to be commutative. A ring in which division is possible but commutativity is not assumed (such as the quaternions) is called a division ring or skew field. (Historically, division rings were sometimes referred to as fields, while fields were called commutative fields.)

As a ring, a field may be classified as a specific type of integral domain, and can be characterized by the following (not exhaustive) chain of class inclusions:

In heraldry, the background of the shield is called the '' field''. The field is usually composed of one or more tinctures ( colours or metals) or furs. The field may be divided or may consist of a variegated pattern.

In rare modern cases the field (or a subdivision thereof) is not a tincture, but is shown as a scene from a landscape. Landscape fields are regarded by many heralds as unheraldic and debased, as they defy the heraldic ideal of simple, boldly coloured images and cannot be consistently drawn from blazon.

The arms of the Inveraray and District Community Council in Scotland have as a field In waves of the sea. The correct language of heraldry is almost infinitely flexible and virtually any image may be blazoned in a correct manner, for example "sky proper" might be blazoned simply Azure or bleu celeste, whilst "waves of the sea" might be blazoned correctly as Azure, 3 bars undee argent which would provide 3 wavy thick white lines on a blue field.

In computer science, data that has several parts, known as a record, can be divided into fields. Relational databases arrange data as sets of database records, also called rows. Each record consists of several fields; the fields of all records form the columns. Examples of fields: name,gender,hair colour.

In object-oriented programming, field (also called data member or member variable) is the data encapsulated within a class or object. In the case of a regular field (also called instance variable), for each instance of the object there is an instance variable: for example, an Employee class has a Name field and there is one distinct name per employee. A static field (also called class variable) is one variable, which is shared by all instances. Fields are abstracted by properties, which allow them to be read and written as if they were fields, but these can be translated to getter and setter method calls.

Field (1991) is a sculpture by British artist Antony Gormley. It consists of approx. 35,000 1 individual terracotta figures, each between 8 and 26 cm high, installed on the floor of a room facing the viewer. The figures were sculpted in Cholula, Mexico by about 60 members of a Texca family of brickmakers, under the supervision of the artist. The sculpture received a lot of media attention upon its first display, and many affectionate parodies.

Field has been installed and displayed at various locations. The specific configuration is changed to suit each location, but the miniature figures are always placed to form a dense carpet with each figure looking towards the viewer. Ideally the Field is extended through a doorway or round a corner, so that the figures going out of sight leave the impression of an unlimited horde.

Several other versions of Field have subsequently been created, including

• Amazonian Field (1991) made in Porto Velho, Brazil (approx. 24,000 figures)2
• Field for the British Isles (1993) made in St Helens near Liverpool in the UK (approx. 40,000 figures)3
• European Field (1993) made in Östra Grevie, Sweden (approx. 40,000 figures)4
• Asian Field (2003) made in Xiangshan County, Guangdong, Guangdong province, People's Republic of China (approx. 190,000 figures)5 and 6
• Asian Field (2004) made in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan (approx. 200,000 figures)
• Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1989) 7

Field for the British Isles was typical in recruiting some 100 volunteers from the pupils and their extended families, of two local schools in St Helens. Each volunteer was given a portion of the 30 tonnes of clay required, along with some loose instructions specifying the rough size and proportions for the figures. An accidental feature of the original Field was that Texca family involved people aged from 6 to 60 working on the figures, and Gormley felt that the involvement of three generations of a family should be continued in all the subsequent versions.

Gormley has also made several other works entitled Field, but these are smaller groups of life size figures more typical of Gormley's earlier work.

In 1994, Gormley won the Turner prize with a collection of his work, including Field for the British Isles, shown at the Tate Gallery.

Field has resulted in some people believing that it was unfair for Gormley to pass the work of the Texca family as his own. Some of the statues were stolen as a result of this.

In video, a field is one of the many still images which are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame. When the fields are displayed on a video monitor they are " interlaced" so that the content of one field will be used on all of the odd-numbered lines on the screen and the other field will be displayed on the even lines. Converting fields to a still frame image requires a process called deinterlacing, in which the missing lines are duplicated or interpolated to recreate the information that would have been contained in the discarded field. Since each field contains only half of the information of a full frame, however, deinterlaced images do not have the resolution of a full frame.

In order to increase the resolution of video images, therefore, new schemes have been created that capture full-frame images for each frame. Video composed of such frames is called progressive scan video.

Video shot with a standard video camera format such as S-VHS or Mini-DV is often interlaced when created, whereas video shot with a film-based camera is almost always progressive. Free-to-air analog TV was mostly broadcast as interlaced material because the trade-off of spatial resolution for frame-rate reduced flickering on Cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions. High-definition digital television (see: HDTV) today can be broadcast terrestrially or distributed through cable system in either interlaced (1080i) or progressive scan formats (720p or 1080p). Most prosumer camcorders can record in progressive scan formats.

In video editing, it is crucial to know which of the two (odd or even) fields is " dominant." Selecting edit points on the wrong field can result in a "flash" at each edit point and playing the video fields in reverse order creates a flickering image.

Field is one of the core concepts used by French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent's habitus and agent's capital ( social, economic and cultural). Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical: Most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations.

Instead of confining his analysis of social relations and change to voluntaristic agency or strictly in terms of the structural concept of class, Bourdieu uses the agency-structure bridging concept of field: any historical, non-homogeneous social-spatial arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. Much of Bourdieu's work observes the semi-independent role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency. This makes his work amenable to liberal-conservative scholarship positing the fundamental cleavages of society as amongst disorderly factions of the working class, in need of disciplinary intervention where they have assumed excessive privilege. Unsurprisingly given his historical and biographical location, however, Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society, in contrast to some of his followers or the influential sociologist Max Weber.

In the context of spatial analysis, geographic information systems, and geographic information science, the term field has been adopted from physics, in which it denotes a quantity that can be theoretically assigned to any point of space, such as temperature or density. This use of field is synonymous with the spatially dependent variable that forms the foundation of geostatistics and crossbreeding between these disciplines is common. Both scalar and vector fields are found in geographic applications, although the former is more common. The simplest formal model for a field is the function, which yields a single value given a point in space (i.e., t = f(x, y, z) )

Even though the basic concept of a field came from physics, geographers have developed independent theories, data models, and analytical methods. One reason for this apparent disconnect is that "geographic fields" tend to have a different fundamental nature than physical fields; that is, they have patterns similar to gravity and magnetism, but are in reality very different. Common types of geographic fields include:

• Natural fields, properties of matter that are formed at scales below that of human perception, such as temperature or soil moisture.
• Artificial or aggregate fields, statistically constructed properties of aggregate groups of individuals, such as population density.
• Fields of potential, which measure conceptual, non-material quantities (and are thus most closely related to the fields of physics), such as the probability that a person at any given location will prefer to use a particular facility (e.g. a grocery store).

Geographic fields can exist over a temporal domain as well as space. For example, temperature varies over time as well as location in space. In fact, many of the methods used in time geography and similar spatiotemporal models treat the location of an individual as a function or field over time.

In physics, a field is a physical quantity that has a value for each point in space and time. For example, on a weather map, the surface wind velocity is described by assigning a vector to each point on a map. Each vector represents the speed and direction of the movement of air at that point. As another example, an electric field can be thought of as a "condition in space" emanating from an electric charge and extending throughout the whole of space. When a test electric charge is placed in this electric field, the particle accelerates due to a force. Physicists have found the notion of a field to be of such practical utility for the analysis of forces that they have come to think of a force as due to a field.

In the modern framework of the quantum theory of fields, even without referring to a test particle, a field occupies space, contains energy, and its presence eliminates a true vacuum. This led physicists to consider electromagnetic fields to be a physical entity, making the field concept a supporting paradigm of the edifice of modern physics. "The fact that the electromagnetic field can possess momentum and energy makes it very real... a particle makes a field, and a field acts on another particle, and the field has such familiar properties as energy content and momentum, just as particles can have". In practice, the strength of most fields has been found to diminish with distance to the point of being undetectable. For instance the strength of many relevant classical fields, such as the gravitational field in Newton's theory of gravity or the electrostatic field in classical electromagnetism, is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source (i.e. they follow the Gauss's law). One consequence is that the Earth's gravitational field quickly becomes undetectable on cosmic scales.

A field can be classified as a scalar field, a vector field, a spinor field or a tensor field according to whether the represented physical quantity is a scalar, a vector, a spinor or a tensor, respectively. A field has a unique tensorial character in every point where it is defined: i.e. a field cannot be a scalar field somewhere and a vector field somewhere else. For example, the Newtonian gravitational field is a vector field: specifying its value at a point in spacetime requires three numbers, the components of the gravitational field vector at that point. Moreover, within each category (scalar, vector, tensor), a field can be either a classical field or a quantum field, depending on whether it is characterized by numbers or quantum operators respectively. In fact in this theory an equivalent representation of field is a field particle, namely a boson.

Field is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

• Alexander P. Field, American politician
• Amod Field (born 1967), American football player
• Andy Field (academic) (born 1973), is professor for psychology at University of Sussex
• Andy Field (Blogger) (born 1983), is a theatremaker, blogger, curator and academic born in Stockport
• Billy Field, Australian singer/songwriter
• Cyrus West Field (1819–1892), American businessman and financier, responsible for the first Transatlantic Cable
• David Dudley Field II (1805–1894), American lawyer, constructed the foundation for the codification of present day common law
• David Field (actor), Australian actor and director
• David Field (astrophysicist), British scientist and author
• Dick Field, right wing Canadian politician
• Edwin Field (1872–1947), English rugby and cricket player
• Edwin Wilkins Field (1804–1871), English lawyer and painter
• E. J. Field, British neuroscientist
• Ernie Field (1943–2013), English boxer and rugby league player
• Eugene Field (1850–1895), American poet
• Frederick Field (scholar), biblical scholar
• Frederick Field (Royal Navy officer), British Admiral of the Fleet
• Frederick Vanderbilt Field (1905–2000), American communist
• Frederick Field (retailer), American retail billionaire
• Hartry Field (born 1946), philosopher at New York University
• Jimmy Field (born 1940), Louisiana politician
• John Field (1782–1837), Irish composer
• Joshua Field (engineer) (1786–1863), British civil engineer
• Marshall Field, founder of Marshall Field and Company
• Marshall Field III, founder of the Chicago Sun
• Marshall Field IV, owner of the Chicago Sun-Times
• Michael Field (author), the pen-name used by poets and lovers Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper
• Nathan Field, (1587–1620), English dramatist and actor
• Noel Field, central character of several show trials in Eastern Europe during the 1950s
• Osmond F. Field, American college sports coach
• Oscar Wadsworth Field, American Medal of Honor recipient
• Richard Field (Jesuit), Anglo-Irish Jesuit
• Richard Field (printer), English printer and publisher, best known for his close association with the poems of William Shakespeare
• Richard Field (theologian), English ecclesiological theologian associated with the work of Richard Hooker
• Richard Stockton Field, United States Senator from New Jersey, and later a United States federal judge
• Richard Field (politician), member of the Tasmanian Parliament
• Richard Field (judge), judge of the High Court of England and Wales
• Roger C. Field, British inventor and designer
• Sally Field, American actress
• Sid Field (1904–1950), English comedian
• Stephen Johnson Field, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
• Syd Field (1935–2013), American screenwriting guru
• Sylvia Field, American actress
• Todd Field, American film director
• The Field (musician), Axel Willner, a Swedish electronic musician
• William Field (American politician), Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1855 to 1856
• William Field (Irish politician) (1848–1935), Nationalist (Parnellite) Member of Parliament for Dublin St Patrick's, 1892–1918
• William Field (Australian pastoralist) (1774–1837), convict turned Tasmanian businessman
• William Field (cricketer) (1816–1890), Tasmanian cricketer
• William J. Field (1909–2002), British Labour Party Member of Parliament for Paddington North 1946–1953
• William Ventris Field, 1st Baron Field (1813–1907), English judge