# culture

> English word · Noun · IPA /ˈkʌlt͡ʃə/ · frequency rank #987

## Definitions
1. The arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation.
2. The beliefs, values, behaviour, and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.
3. The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.
4. Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings.
5. Cultivation.
6. The process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium.
7. The growth thus produced.
8. A group of bacteria.
9. The details on a map that do not represent natural features of the area delineated, such as names and the symbols for towns, roads, meridians, and parallels.
10. Ellipsis of archaeological culture (“recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society”).
11. Ethnicity, race (and its associated arts, customs, etc.)

## Etymology
From Middle French culture (“cultivation; culture”), from Latin cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, to grow, worship”) (related to colōnus and colōnia), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷel- (“to move; to turn (around)”).

## Easily confused with
- **cultured** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/culture-vs-cultured)
- **capture** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/capture-vs-culture)
- **couture** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/couture-vs-culture)
- **cultural** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/cultural-vs-culture)

## Common misspellings (10)
`cculture`, `cluture`, `cullture`, `cultrue`, `cultture`, `cultuer`, `culturre`, `culutre`, `cutlure`, `uclture`

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-09-03.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/culture