format

n. A standard size or configuration; form2. Audiovisual RecordsThe aspect ratio of a film. ComputingA structure used for the interchange, storage, or display of data. The layout of a document. The appearance of a book, especially the number of times a printed sheet has been folded to make a book. v. ComputingTo prepare a disk for storing data. ComputingTo apply a particular design to a document.

Notes

Format1 is synonymous with form2 and the use of this sense is a fairly recent shift in the language. Format is commonly used to describe certain standard sizes of photographs, including cartes-de-visite, cabinet cards, stereographs, and many numerical designation for film sizes, and this sense appears in The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography (1965). AACR2 (1976) and AACR2R (1988) use format to mean "a particular physical presentation of an item," but the term does not appear in AACR (1967, 1970). - Examples of format3 include the USMARC format, HTML, and XML, along with proprietary formats such as Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word. - Examples of format5 include folios, quartos, and octavos. - Examples of format7 include the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to apply style to a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document.