What is "guild"

Guild \Guild\, n. [OE. gilds, AS. gild, gield, geld, tribute, a society or company where payment was made for its charge and support, fr. AS. gildan, gieldan, to pay. See Yield, v. t.]

1. An association of men belonging to the same class, or engaged in kindred pursuits, formed for mutual aid and protection; a business fraternity or corporation; as, the Stationers' Guild; the Ironmongers' Guild. They were originally licensed by the government, and endowed with special privileges and authority.

2. A guildhall. [Obs.]
   --Spenser.

3. A religious association or society, organized for charitable purposes or for assistance in parish work.

early 13c., yilde (spelling later influenced by Old Norse gildi "guild, brotherhood"), a semantic fusion of Old English gegyld "guild" and gild, gyld "payment, tribute, compensation," from Proto-Germanic *gelth- "pay" (cognates: Old Frisian geld "money," Old Saxon geld "payment, sacrifice, reward," Old High German gelt "payment, tribute;" see yield (v.)).\n

\nThe connecting sense is of a tribute or payment to join a protective or trade society. But some see the root in its alternative sense of "sacrifice," as if in worship, and see the word as meaning a combination for religious purposes, either Christian or pagan. The Anglo-Saxon guilds had a strong religious component; they were burial societies that paid for masses for the souls of deceased members as well as paying fines in cases of justified crime. The continental custom of guilds of merchants arrived after the Conquest, with incorporated societies of merchants in each town or city holding exclusive rights of doing business there. In many cases they became the governing body of a town (compare Guildhall, which came to be the London city hall). Trade guilds arose 14c., as craftsmen united to protect their common interest.

n. 1 A group of tradespeople made up of merchants, craftspeople, or artisans, particularly in the Middle Ages. 2 (context biology English) A group of diverse species that share common characteristics or habits. 3 (cx video games English) An organized group of players who regularly play together in a multiplayer game.

n. a formal association of people with similar interests; "he joined a golf club"; "they formed a small lunch society"; "men from the fraternal order will staff the soup kitchen today" [syn: club, society, gild, lodge, order]

Guilds were and are associations of artisans or merchants who control the practice of their craft in a particular town. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of tradesmen. They were organized in a manner something between a professional association, trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials. A lasting legacy of traditional guilds are the guildhalls constructed and used as meeting places.

An important result of the guild framework was the emergence of universities at Bologna (established in 1088), Oxford (at least since 1096) and Paris (c. 1150).

A guild is an association of craftspeople in a particular trade.

Guild may also refer to:

• Clan (computer gaming), also known as Guild
• Europa 1400: The Guild and its sequel The Guild 2
• Guild (ecology)
• Guild (surname)
• Guild Inn, park and hotel in Toronto
• Guild Guitar Company, a guitar manufacturer
• The Guild (web series), comedy
• Guild (permaculture)
• Guild (series), series of video game compilations
• Authors Guild, professional organization for writers

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

• Alan Guild (born 1947), Scottish footballer
• Henry Rice Guild, American lawyer
• Ken Guild, Scottish politician
• Nicholas Guild, American writer
• Nigel Guild (born 1949), British Royal Navy admiral
• Shirin Guild (born 1946), British Iranian fashion designer
• Tricia Guild, British designer
• William L. Guild (1910–1993), American lawyer and jurist

A guild (or ecological guild) is any group of species that exploit the same resources, often in related ways. It does not follow that the species within a guild occupy the same, or even similar, ecological niches. Guilds are defined according to the locations, the attributes, and the activities of their component species; for example, their mode of acquiring nutrients, their mobility, and the zones of their habitat that they occupy or otherwise exploit. The number of guilds occupying an ecosystem is termed its disparity. Members of a guild within a given ecology could be competing for some resources (such as space or light), while cooperating in resisting wind stresses, attracting pollinators, or detecting predators, such as happens among savannah-dwelling antelope and zebra.

A guild does not typically have strict, or even clearly defined boundaries. A broadly defined guild will practically always have constituent guilds; for example, grazing guilds will have some species that concentrate on coarse, plentiful forage, while others concentrate on low-growing, finer plants. Each of those two sub-guilds may be regarded as guilds in appropriate contexts, and they might in turn have sub-guilds in more closely selective contexts. Some authorities even speak of a fractal resource model. This is a concept that arises in several related contexts, such as the metabolic theory of ecology, the scaling pattern of occupancy, and spatial analysis in ecology, all of which are concepts fundamental in defining guilds.

An ecological guild is not to be confused with a taxocene, a group of phylogenetically related organisms in a community that do not necessarily share the same or similar niches. Nor is a guild the same as a trophic species.

The is a compilation of video games produced by Level-5 for the Nintendo 3DS in cooperation with various game designers. The first compilation, , consists of four games and was released at retail in Japan on May 31, 2012. Three of the titles have been announced for individual release on the Nintendo eShop in Western territories during Fall 2012. All four of them were released individually on the Japanese eShop not long after. A second compilation, , which features three games designed by Keiji Inafune, Kazuya Asano, Takemaru Abiko and Kaz Ayabe, was released on the Nintendo eShop in Japan during March 2013 and began release in Western territories in May 2013.