artifact.
An object made or shaped by human hand or labor.
Meaning & usage
An object made or shaped by human hand or labor.
An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
Something viewed as a product of human agency or conception rather than an inherent element.
A finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.
The spot on his lung turned out to be an artifact of the X-ray process.
A finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error. An appearance or structure in protoplasm due to death, the method of preparation of specimens, or the use of reagents, and not present during life.
A finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error. A perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or an image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact processing algorithm or of physical interference in an acquisition process.
This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has unsightly artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.
The opacity in his chest radiograph turned out to be an artifact due to the film.
An object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.
The dig produced many Roman artifacts.
An object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation. A powerful weapon, armor or another object, often with magical properties.
Ellipsis of build artifact.
Any object in the collection of a museum. May be used sensu stricto only for human-made objects, or may include ones that are not human-made.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂er- Proto-Indo-European *h₂értis Proto-Italic *artis Latin ars Latin arte Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁k- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *dʰh₁kyéti Proto-Italic *θakjō Proto-Italic *fakjō Latin faciō Latin factum Vulgar Latin *artefactum Italian artefattoder. English artifact Alteration of artefact, from Italian artefatto, from Latin arte (“by skill”) (ablative of ars (“art”)) + factum (“thing made”) (from facio (“to make, do”)).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.