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Dec 17, 2010 This week's theme Words made with combining forms This week's words exogamy ventifact tautology leptorrhine ontology This week's comments AWADmail 442 Next week's theme No el Roll the dice Get a random word from A.Word.A.Day archives Discuss Feedback RSS/XML A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg ontology PRONUNCIATION: (on-TOL-uh-jee) MEANING: noun: The philosophical study of existence and the nature of being. ETYMOLOGY: From Greek onto- (being) + -logy (study). First recorded use: 1663. NOTES: In the context of computer and information sciences, ontology is the formal representation of knowledge in a domain, for example, by defining classes, their attributes, and relationships. USAGE: "But there's still that pesky problem of ontology. 'He does exist and he doesn't really exist. What does that mean?'" Christy Corp-Minamiji; Interview: Wandering Through Time with Award Winning Author Charles Yu; Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Nov 15, 2010. Explore "ontology" in the Visual Thesaurus. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté. -Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet (b. 1939)

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