artificial

Etymology

From Middle English artificial (“man-made”) via Old French (modern French artificiel), from Latin artificiālis from artificium (“skill”), from artifex, from ars (“skill”), and -fex, from facere (“to make”). Displaced native Old English cræftlīċ.

adj

1. Man-made; made by humans; of artifice.
   The flowers were artificial, and he thought them rather tacky.
   An artificial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized dialysis machine. Such devices mimic the way real kidneys cleanse blood and eject impurities and surplus water as urine. But they are nothing like as efficient, and can cause bleeding, clotting and infection—not to mention inconvenience for patients, who typically need to be hooked up to one three times a week for hours at a time. 2013-06-01, “A better waterworks”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 5 (Technology Quarterly)
2. Insincere; fake, forced, or feigned.
   Her manner was somewhat artificial.
3. Not natural or normal: imposed arbitrarily or without regard to the specifics or normal circumstances of a person, a situation, etc.
   This results in an artificial conflation of the individual crises experienced by Western European states and leads to imprecise judgements on the impact of Marshall. This confusing conflation is not simply the product of retrospection. 1990-02-19, Peter Burnham, The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction, Springer, page 73
   [If] the economic literature of the eighteenth century is examined in terms other than the narrow categories of free trade and protection, the artificial division between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries would break down . 2002-05-09, Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, Michael Sonenscher, Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory, Cambridge University Press, page 35
   In Alberta, for example, policy documents reinforce an artificial distinction between leadership-related activity and management. 2016-11-10, Gabriele Lakomski, Scott Eacott, Colin W. Evers, Questioning Leadership: New directions for educational organisations, Taylor & Francis, page 156
   The method of suppression is generally either an artificial conflation of public and private, in which the public is represented as private, or an artificial separation of public from private, which distracts attention from the public[…] 2017-07-12, A. Javier Trevino, The Sociology of Law: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives, Routledge
4. (bridge) Conveying some meaning other than the actual contents of one's hand.
   An artificial bid doesn't necessarily show length in the suit being bid, it has an altogether different meaning. 1999, Edwin B. Kantar, Eddie Kantar Teaches Advanced Bridge Defense, page 191
   North makes an artificial call of 3♧, the cheapest suit at the 3 level, to show a very poor hand. What North holds in clubs doesn't matter at all. 2008, David Galt, Teach Yourself Visually Bridge, page 219