core

In general usage, an essential part of a thing surrounded by other essential things.

Adjective

  1. Forming the most important or essential part.
    • Privately held businesses may hold assets or have charges to their financial statements which are not core to their main business activity. - 2009, Greg Hayes, A Practical Guide to Business Valuations for SMEs, page 68:
    • Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses...
    • These lists cover important vocabulary from eight core subjects that students need to master during secondary education: Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English, Geology, History, Mathematics, and Physics. - 2018,...
  2. Deeply and authentically involved in the culture surrounding the sport.
    • Our interest is not in core skaters such as young males and pro skaters but the voices of those on the periphery of the subculture. - 2015, Kara-Jane Lombard, Skateboarding: Subcultures, Sites and Shifts, page 45:
    • We had a segmentation strategy, where the small, independent core skate shops — the three hundred boutiques around the country who really created us — had a certain product line that was exclusive to them. […] We said...
    • […] which provoked resistance among the 'core' snowboarders. - 2023, Mari Kristin Sisjord, Women in Snowboarding:

Origin

From Middle English core, kore, coor (“apple-core, pith”), of obscure and uncertain origin. Possibly of native English origin, from Old English *cor, related to Old English *coruc, *corc (diminutive) (> Middle English cork, crok (“core of an apple or other fruit, heart of an onion”)) and Old English corn (“seed", also "grain”); or alternatively perhaps from Old French cuer (“heart”), from Latin cor (“heart”); or from Old French cors (“body”), from Latin corpus (“body”). Compare also Middle English colk, coke, coll (“the heart or centre of an apple or onion, core”), Dutch kern (“core”), German Kern (“core”). See also heart, corpse. Compare typologically Russian серде́чник (serdéčnik), сердцеви́на (serdcevína)) (akin to се́рдце (sérdce), cognate with heart, Latin cor).

Noun Entry 2

  1. In general usage, an essential part of a thing surrounded by other essential things.
    • the core of an apple or quince

    1. The central part of a fruit, containing the kernels or seeds.

    2. The heart or inner part of a physical thing.

      • Reindeer are well suited to the taiga’s frigid winters. They can maintain a thermogradient between body core and the environment of up to 100 degrees, in part because of insulation provided by their fur, and in part...

    3. The anatomical core, muscles which bridge abdomen and thorax.

    4. The center or inner part of a space or area.

      • the core of the square - 1614, Walter Ralegh [i.e., Walter Raleigh], The Historie of the World […], London: […] William Stansby for Walter Burre, […], →OCLC, (please specify |book=1 to 5):
  2. The most important part of a thing or aggregate of things wherever located and whether of any determinate location at all; the essence.
    • the core of a subject
    • Jones’ sad eyes betray a pervasive pain his purposefully spare dialogue only hints at, while the perfectly cast Brolin conveys hints of playfulness and warmth while staying true to the craggy stoicism at the character’s...
    • General vocabulary is often defined as a common core of English words and operationalized as the most frequent words in a balanced and representative corpus of English. - 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing...

    1. A technical term for classification of things denoting those parts of a category that are most easily or most likely understood as within it.

      (botany) The main and most diverse monophyletic group within a clade or taxonomic group.

    2. A technical term for classification of things denoting those parts of a category that are most easily or most likely understood as within it.

      (game theory) The set of feasible allocations that cannot be improved upon by a subset (a coalition) of the economy's agents.

    3. (art) A thematic aesthetic; objects related to a specific topic

      • Photographs of cottagecore focuses on countrysides or forests.
  3. particular parts of technical instruments or machines essential in function:

    Coordinate Terms: cavity

    1. (engineering, manufacturing) The portion of a mold that creates a cavity or impression within the part (casting or molded part) or that makes a hole in or through the part.

    2. (computing, informal, historical) Ellipsis of core memory (“magnetic data storage”).

    3. (computer hardware) An individual computer processor, in the sense when several processors (called cores or CPU cores) are plugged together in one single integrated circuit to work as one (called a multi-core processor).

      • I wanted to play a particular computer game, which required I buy a new computer, so while the game said it needed at least a dual-core processor, I wanted my computer to be a bit ahead of the curve, so I bought a...

    4. (engineering) The material between surface materials in a structured composite sandwich material.

      • a floor panel with a Nomex honeycomb core

    5. (engineering, nuclear physics) The inner part of a nuclear reactor, in which the nuclear reaction takes place.

      • In the engine room, the changing angle dropped the melted core to the deck. The hot mass attacked the steel deck first, burning through that, then the titanium of the hull. Five seconds later the engine room was vented...

    6. (military) The central fissile portion of a fission weapon.

      • In a hollow-core design, neutrons escape from the core more readily, allowing more fissile material to be used (and thus allowing for a greater yield) while still keeping the core subcritical prior to detonation.

    7. A piece of ferromagnetic material (e.g., soft iron), inside the windings of an electromagnet, that channels the magnetic field.

    8. (printing) A hollow cylindrical piece of cardboard around which a web of paper or plastic is wound.

  4. Hence particular parts of a subject studied or examined by technical operations, likened by position and practical or structural robustness to kernels, cores in the general sense above.

    1. (medicine) A tiny sample of organic material obtained by means of a fine-needle biopsy.

    2. The bony process which forms the central axis of the horns in many animals.

    3. A disorder of sheep caused by worms in the liver.

      • [the skin of the sheep] is clear from cores and jogs under the jaws. - 1750, William Ellis, Modern Husbandry or Practice of Farming:

    4. (biochemistry) The central part of a protein's structure, consisting mostly of hydrophobic amino acids.

    5. A cylindrical sample of rock or other materials obtained by core drilling.

    6. (physics) An atomic nucleus plus inner electrons (i.e., an atom, except for its valence electrons).

Forms

cores

Synonyms

crux gist

Hyponyms

apple core bifacial core drill core

Derived

absorbent core cable core central core disease clustercore computer core core belief coreblowing core business core city core competence core competency core constituency core constituent core course core curriculum core day core drill core drilling core dump core eudicot coregasm corehole core hole core hours

Noun obsolete

  1. A body of individuals; an assemblage.
    • He was in a core of people. - 1622, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban [i.e. Francis Bacon], The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, […], London: […] W[illiam] Stansby for Matthew Lownes, and...

Origin

See corps.

Forms

cores

Noun Entry 4

  1. A miner's underground working time or shift.

Origin

See chore.

Forms

cores

Noun units of measure

  1. Alternative form of cor: a former Hebrew and Phoenician unit of volume.

Origin

From Biblical Hebrew כֹּר (kōr).

Forms

cores

Noun aeronautics, aerospace

  1. A deposit paid by the purchaser of a rebuilt part, to be refunded on return of a used, rebuildable part, or the returned rebuildable part itself.

Origin

Possibly an acronym for cash on return.

Forms

cores

Noun neologism

  1. An aesthetic ending in the suffix -core, such as cottagecore, normcore, etc.
    • Some of the most popular "cores" at the moment—according to the Wiki's "trending pages" list—are cottage and goblin and trauma and angel. If the last one sounds appealing, you can participate by eating more meringues...
    • The rise of micro-cores coincides with the rise of hyper-specific internet aesthetics. There's even an Aesthetics Wiki that chronicles all the possible cores online, including, but not limited to, bubblegumbitchcore,...
    • It's more than okay to let a microtrend be just that. Naming it as a "core" turns the clothing into a social media movement, and more often than not, the title is an overcomplication for rather basic color choices or...

Origin

From -core, ultimately from Etymology 1.

Forms

cores

Verb

  1. To remove the core of an apple or other fruit.
  2. To cut or drill through the core of (something).
    • But the other thing to take into account is, when you look at the Katahdin and the Polyphemus, they both have their boiler plants pretty much amidships or slightly forward of amidships, which means that, in the event of...
  3. To extract a sample with a drill.

Forms

cores coring cored

Derived

corer uncore uncored