Definition of "civilization"

civilization

/ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/

noun
countable and uncountable, plural civilizations
1. An organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political, or technical development.
  Quotations
  But civilizations, like the penis, rise and fall, and when the towers and battlements crumble into the earth, they return to the embrace of the Great Mother.
  1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., pages rise and fall
2. (uncountable) Human society, particularly civil society.
  Quotations
  Civilisation has imbued man's minds with false ideas of the evil of sex and its fulfilment.
  1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 159
3. The act or process of civilizing or becoming civilized.
4. The state or quality of being civilized.
5. (obsolete) The act of rendering a criminal process civil.
proper noun
1. Collectively, those people of the world considered to have a high standard of behavior and / or a high level of development. Commonly subjectively used by people of one society to exclusively refer to their society, or their elite sub-group, or a few associated societies, implying all others, in time or geography or status, as something less than civilised, as savages or barbarians. cf refinement, elitism, civilised society, the Civilised World