— informational , adj.
/in'feuhr may"sheuhn/ , n.
1. knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance; news: information concerning a crime.
2. knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc.; factual data: His wealth of general information is amazing.
3. the act or fact of informing.
4. an office, station, service, or employee whose function is to provide information to the public: The ticket seller said to ask information for a timetable.
5. See Directory Assistance .
6. Law.
a. an official criminal charge presented, usually by the prosecuting officers of the state, without the interposition of a grand jury.
b. a criminal charge, made by a public official under oath before a magistrate, of an offense punishable summarily.
c. the document containing the depositions of witnesses against one accused of a crime.
7. (in information theory) an indication of the number of possible choices of messages, expressible as the value of some monotonic function of the number of choices, usually the logarithm to the base 2.
8. Computers.
a. important or useful facts obtained as output from a computer by means of processing input data with a program: Using the input data, we have come up with some significant new information.
b. data at any stage of processing (input, output, storage, transmission, etc.).
[ 1350-1400; ME: instruction, teaching, a forming of the mind 1 , -ATION ]
Syn. 1. data, facts, intelligence, advice. 2. INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM are terms for human acquirements through reading, study, and practical experience. INFORMATION applies to facts told, read, or communicated that may be unorganized and even unrelated: to pick up useful information. KNOWLEDGE is an organized body of information, or the comprehension and understanding consequent on having acquired and organized a body of facts: a knowledge of chemistry. WISDOM is a knowledge of people, life, and conduct, with the facts so thoroughly assimilated as to have produced sagacity, judgment, and insight: to use wisdom in handling people.