Culture: Shared Ways of Living, and Bacteria in a Dish

Culture comes from farming. Latin *cultura* meant tilling the soil, and every modern sense is a metaphor from that: cultivating the mind, cultivating a society's arts, or cultivating bacteria in a dish. The laboratory sense is the most literal of the three.

• Shared customs and beliefs. *Japanese culture.*
• The arts collectively. *Funding for arts and culture.*
• The atmosphere of an organisation. *A culture of secrecy.*
• Microorganisms grown deliberately. *A bacterial culture.*
• To grow in a laboratory (verb). *The cells were cultured for a week.*

Word forms

How it is used in a sentence

• The report criticised the culture of the department.Institutional habits — a very common use in inquiries.
• Live cultures are added to yoghurt.The biological sense, on a supermarket label.
• Cultural exchange programmes ran for a decade.The adjective.

Culture words built on the same root

• Agriculture — cultivation of fields
• Horticulture — cultivation of gardens
• Apiculture — beekeeping
• Aquaculture — farming water species
• Cult — from the same root, originally meaning care or worship

From Latin *cultura*, from *colere*, to tend or till. The modern anthropological sense — culture as everything a society learns and shares — was established in the nineteenth century and is only about 150 years old.