Noun

(en noun)

(obsolete) A rock; boulder; a hill.

A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air.

*

*:So this was my future home, I thought!Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds , it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.

Any mass of dust, steam or smoke resembling such a mass.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-29, volume=407, issue=8842, page=29, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Unspontaneous combustion , passage=Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.}}

Anything which makes things foggy or gloomy.

A group or swarm, especially suspended above the ground or flying.

:

*(Bible), (w) xii. 1

*:so great a cloud of witnesses

An elliptical shape or symbol whose outline is a series of semicircles, supposed to resemble a cloud.

:

The Internet, regarded as an amorphous omnipresent space for processing and storage, the focus of cloud computing.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author=(Jonathan Freedland)

, volume=189, issue=1, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Obama's once hip brand is now tainted , passage=Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.}}

(figuratively) A negative aspect of something positive: see every cloud has a silver lining or every silver lining has a cloud.

*{{quote-news, year=2011, date=January 25, author=Phil McNulty, work=BBC

, title= Blackpool 2-3 Man Utd , passage=The only cloud on their night was that injury to Rafael, who was followed off the pitch by his anxious brother Fabio as he was stretchered away down the tunnel.}}

(slang) Crystal methamphetamine.

A large, loosely-knitted headscarf worn by women.

Noun

(wikipedia data) (-) or plural noun

English plurals: Pieces of information.

(uncountable, collectively) Information, especially in a scientific or computational context.

*

With fresh material, taxonomic conclusions are leavened by recognition that the material examined reflects the site it occupied; a herbarium packet gives one only a small fraction of the data desirable for sound conclusions. Herbarium material does not, indeed, allow one to extrapolate safely: what you see is what you get

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=76, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Snakes and ladders , passage=Risk is everywhere.

(computing) A representation of facts or ideas in a formalized manner capable of being communicated or manipulated by some process.