artificial

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artificial

adjective adulterine, artificiosus, assumed, casuistic, concocted, deceptive, ersatz, faked, false, feigned, fictitious, forged, illusory, imaginary, imagined, imitation, imitative, man-made, not natural, simulated, simulative, spurious, superficial, ungenuine, unnatural, unreal
Associated concepts: artificial boundaries, artificial ingrediints, artificial monuments, artificial person, artificial pond, artificial presumption, artificial watercourse

ARTIFICIAL. What is the result of, or relates to, the arts; opposed to natural; thus we say a corporation is an artificial person, in opposition to a natural person. Artificial accession is the uniting one property to another by art, opposed to a simple natural union. 1 Bouv. Inst. n. 503.

References in classic literature ?

And the bandmaster wrote a work of twenty-five volumes about the artificial bird.

But one evening, when the artificial bird was singing its best, and the Emperor lay in bed listening to it, something in the bird went crack.

You shall sing whenever you like, and I will break the artificial bird into a thousand pieces.

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But somehow at the moment this seemed like a second masquerade, more artificial and frivolous than the first.

The moonlight had broadened and brightened, the wind had driven off the clouds and itself died fitfully away, when he came round again to the artificial lake in front of the house.

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Even had he been able to enter into the true spirit he would have found it hard to keep that spirit in his translation, using as he did the artificial heroic couplet.

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Imitating Petrarch, Wyatt nearly limits himself as regards substance to the treatment of the artificial love-theme, lamenting the unkindness of ladies who very probably never existed and whose favor in any case he probably regarded very lightly; yet even so, he often strikes a manly English note of independence, declaring that if the lady continues obstinate he will not die for her love.

Historically much the most important feature of Wyatt's experiment was the introduction of the sonnet, a very substantial service indeed; for not only did this form, like the love-theme, become by far the most popular one among English lyric poets of the next two generations, setting a fashion which was carried to an astonishing excess; but it is the only artificial form of foreign origin which has ever been really adopted and naturalized in English, and it still remains the best instrument for the terse expression of a single poetic thought.