feature

Etymology

From Middle English feture, from Anglo-Norman feture, from Old French faiture, from Latin factūra, from Latin factus, from Latin faciō (“do, make”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- (“to put, place, set”). Doublet of facture.

noun

1. (obsolete) One's structure or make-up: form, shape, bodily proportions.
2. An important or main item.
3. (media) A long, prominent article or item in the media, or the department that creates them; frequently used technically to distinguish content from news.
   1. (film) Ellipsis of feature film.
4. Any of the physical constituents of the face (eyes, nose, etc.).
5. (computing) A beneficial capability of a piece of software.
   The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. 2002, Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom
6. The cast or structure of anything, or of any part of a thing, as of a landscape, a picture, a treaty, or an essay; any marked peculiarity or characteristic.
   one of the features of the landscape
   The most prominent feature of the New England land system was the town grant, which in every case became the territorial basis of a group settlement. 1911, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
7. (archaeology) Something discerned from physical evidence that helps define, identify, characterize, and interpret an archeological site.
   A feature of many Central Texas prehistoric archeological sites is a low spreading pile of stones called a rock midden. Other features at these sites may include small hearths.
8. (engineering) Characteristic forms or shapes of parts. For example, a hole, boss, slot, cut, chamfer, or fillet.
9. (statistics, machine learning) An individual measurable property or characteristic of a phenomenon being observed; the input of a model.
   Coordinate term: (output) parameter
   MIT researchers are striving to improve the interpretability of features so decision makers will be more comfortable using the outputs of machine-learning models. Drawing on years of field work, they developed a taxonomy to help developers craft features that will be easier for their target audience to understand. 2022-06-30, Adam Zewe, “Building explainability into the components of machine-learning models”, in MIT News
10. (music) The act of being featured in a piece of music.
11. (linguistics) The elements into which linguistic units can be broken down.

verb

1. (transitive) To ascribe the greatest importance to something within a certain context.
2. (transitive) To star, to contain.
3. (intransitive) To appear, to make an appearance.
   Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love, Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water and Layla by Derek and the Dominos also featured in the top five. November 27, 2009, “Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child has 'best guitar riff'”, in BBC
4. (transitive, dated) To have features resembling.
   More than his talents, Roger grudged him his looks, the brown eyes, golden hair, and oval face, which made people say how Johnny Weir featured his mother. Sunday. Reading for the Young (page 219)