hardware

Noun

1. Fixtures, equipment, fasteners, tools, and devices used for general-purpose construction and repair of a structure or object. Also such equipment as sold as stock by a store of the same name, e.g. hardware store.
   • He needed a hammer, nails, screws, nuts, bolts and other assorted hardware, so he went to the hardware store.
2. Equipment.
   • military hardware
   • BOWEN: The monster trucks of Mars rovers, joke scientists, equipped with an array of sophisticated hardware to look for signs of water and answer scientists questions. - 2003 June 6, “Mission to Mars”, in CBS_Rather:
   • It is one thing to see an intercooler as a simple entry in a textbook, but to witness the actual hardware as it crawled down the road was awe-inspiring. - 2009 May, Lee S. Langston, “plowing new ground.”, in Mechanical...
3. The part of a computer that is fixed and cannot be altered without replacement or physical modification; motherboard, expansion cards, etc.
   • Hardware is the generally accepted colloquism for anything inside a computer other than an engineer. - 1952, R.L. Michaelson, “Binary Arithmetic”, in The Incorporated Statistician, volume 3, number 1 (Feb. 1952), pages...

   Coordinate Terms: software

4. Electronic equipment.
5. Metal implements.
   • The designers have put their logo on the hardware of this bag here.
6. A firearm.
7. Medals or trophies.
8. Ellipsis of hardware store.