A variety of forms.

A form is a document with spaces (fields) in which to write or select, for a series of documents with similar contents. The documents usually have the printed parts in common, possibly except for a serial number. Advantages of forms include:

• one has to write less (while the printing is almost universally done in some automatic way)
• one is told or reminded what information has to be supplied
• uniformity, for convenience in processing

A form on a computer allows for conveniently typing in the variable parts (the input data).

Forms, when completed, may be a statement, a request, an order, etc., e.g. a check may be a form. Also there are forms for taxes; filling one in is a duty to have determined how much tax one owes, and/or the form is a request for a refund. See also Tax return.

Forms may be filled out in duplicate (or triplicate, meaning three times) when the information gathered on the form needs to be distributed to several departments within an organisation. This can be done using carbon paper.

Forms have existed for a significant amount of time, with historians of law have discovered preprinted legal forms from the early 19th century that greatly simplified the task of drafting complaints and various other legal pleadings. It is believed that the form was conceived by mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.^[1] In some jurisdictions, like California, many common types of legal pleadings must be submitted on official government forms.

Blank forms are generally not copyrightable.^[2]

Notes[link]

1. ^ On the economy of machinery and manufactures p114
2. ^ 37 Code of Federal Regulations § 202.1(c) (2006) ("Blank forms, such as time cards, graph paper, account books, diaries, bank checks, scorecards, address books, report forms, order forms and the like, which are designed for recording information and do not in themselves convey information [are not subject to copyright]"); see also Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1880).

See also[link]

• Database
• Questionnaire
• XForms
• Form (web)
• Form (programming)
• Oracle Forms
• Windows Forms
• Master-detail
• Enterprise Forms Automation

Look up -form or form in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Look up form in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object.

Form may also refer to:

• Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter data
• Form (education), a class, set or group of students
• Form (exercise), a proper way of performing an exercise
• Form (horse racing), a record of a racehorse's performance, or similarly for an athlete
• Form (nest), a shallow depression or flattened nest of grass used by a hare
• Form (religion), an academic term for prescriptions or norms on religious practice
• Musical form, a generic type of composition or the structure of a particular piece
• Criminal record, slang

Mathematics[link]

• Algebraic form (homogeneous polynomial), which generalises quadratic forms to degrees 3 and more, also known as quantics or simply forms
• Bilinear form, on a vector space V over a field F is a mapping V × V → F that is linear in both arguments
• Differential form, a concept from differential topology that combines multilinear forms and smooth functions
• Indeterminate form, an algebraic expression that cannot be used to evaluate a limit
• Modular form, a (complex) analytic function on the upper half plane satisfying a certain kind of functional equation and growth condition
• Multilinear form, which generalises bilinear forms to mappings V^N → F
• Quadratic form, a homogeneous polynomial of degree two in a number of variables

Biology[link]

• Form (botany), a formal taxon at a rank lower than species
• Form (zoology), informal taxa used sometimes in zoology

Computing[link]

• Form (web), a document form used on a web page to, typically, submit user data to a server
• Form (programming), a component-based representation of a GUI window
• FORM (symbolic manipulation system), a program for symbolic computations
• Form (computer virus), the most common computer virus of the 1990s
• Oracle Forms, a Rapid Application Development environment for developing database applications
• Windows Forms, the graphical API within the Microsoft .NET Framework for access to native Microsoft Windows interface elements
• XForms, an XML format for the specification of user interfaces, specifically web forms

Martial arts[link]

• Kata (型 or 形), the detailed pattern of defence-and-attack
• Taeguk (Taekwondo) (형), the "forms" used to create a foundation for the teaching of Taekwondo
• Taolu (套路), forms used in Chinese martial arts and sport wushu

Philosophy[link]

• Substantial form, asserts that ideas organize matter and make it intelligible
• Theory of Forms, asserts that ideas possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality
• Value-form, an approach to understanding the origins of commodity trade and the formation of markets
• Argument form, aka Logical form or Test form - replacing the different words, or sentences, that make up the argument with letters, along the lines of algebra; the letters represent logical variables

Other[link]

• First-order reliability method, a semi-probabilistic reliability analysis method devised to evaluate the reliability of a system
• Form, the relation a word has to a lexeme
• Formwork, a mould used for concrete construction
• Isoform, several different forms of the same protein
• Sixth form, an English term for the final two years of secondary school
• The Forms (band), an American indie rock band

See also[link]

• FORM (disambiguation)
• Formation (disambiguation)
• Formula (disambiguation)
• Conformity (disambiguation)
• Deformation (disambiguation)
• Inform (disambiguation)
• Reform (disambiguation)
• All pages beginning with "Form"
• All pages with titles containing "Form"

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

The term document has multiple meanings in ordinary language and in scholarship. WordNet 3.1. lists four meanings (October 2011):

• document, written document, papers (writing that provides information (especially information of an official nature))
• document (anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means of symbolic marks)
• document (a written account of ownership or obligation)
• text file, document ((computer science) a computer file that contains text (and possibly formatting instructions) using seven-bit ASCII characters).

In Library and information science and in documentation science is "document" considered a basic theoretical construct. It is everything which may be preserved or represented in order to serve as evidence for some purpose. The classical example provided by Suzanne Briet is an antelope: "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document, she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents, since the antelope itself is the primary document." (Quoted from Buckland, 1998 ^[1]). (This view has been seen as an early expression of what now is known as actor–network theory).

That documents cannot be defined by their transmission medium (such as paper) is evident because of the existence of electronic documents.

What is a document?[link]

The concept of document has been defined as “any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental" (Briet, 1951, 7; here quoted from Buckland, 1991).

A much cited article asked "what is a document" and concluded this way: “The evolving notion of ‘‘document’’ among Otlet, Briet, Schürmeyer, and the other documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever functioned as a document rather than traditional physical forms of documents. The shift to digital technology would seem to make this distinction even more important. Levy’s thoughtful analyses have shown that an emphasis on the technology of digital documents has impeded our understanding of digital documents as documents (e.g., Levy, 1994^[2]). A conventional document, such as a mail message or a technical report, exists physically in digital technology as a string of bits, as does everything else in a digital environment. As an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence by those who study it.

Types of documents[link]

Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private or public. They may also be described as a draft or proof. When a document is copied, the source is referred to as the original.

There are accepted standards for specific applications in various fields, such as:

• a7a: thesis, paper, journal
• Business and accounting: Invoice, quote, RFP, Proposal, Contract, Packing slip, Manifest, Report detailed & summary, Spread sheet, MSDS, Waybill, Bill of Lading (BOL), Financial statement, Nondisclosure agreement (NDA) or sometimes referred to as; Mutual nondisclosure agreement (MNDA)
• Law and politics: summons, certificate, license, gazette
• Government and industry: white paper
• Media and marketing: brief, mock-up, script

Such standard documents can be created based on a template.

Developing documents[link]

The page layout of a document is the manner in which information is graphically arranged in the document space (e.g., on a page). If the appearance of the document is of concern, page layout is generally the responsibility of a graphic designer. Typography deals with the design of letter and symbol forms, as well as their physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information design focuses on the effective communication of information, especially in industrial documents and public signs. Simple text documents may not require a visual design and may be handled by an author, clerk or transcriber. Forms may require a visual design for the initial fields, but not to fill out the forms.

History[link]

Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied to it as ink, either by hand (to make a hand-written document) or by a mechanical process (such as a printing press or, more recently, a laser printer).

Through time, documents have also been written with ink on papyrus (starting in ancient Egypt) or parchment; scratched as runes on stone using a sharp apparatus; stamped or cut into clay and then baked to make clay tablets (e.g., in the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilisations). The paper, papyrus or parchment might be rolled up as a scroll or cut into sheets and bound into a book. Today short documents might also consist of sheets of paper stapled together.

Modern electronic means of storing and displaying documents include:

• desktop computer and monitor (or laptop, tablet PC, etc.); optionally with a printer to obtain a hard copy
• Personal digital assistant (PDA)
• dedicated e-book device
• electronic paper
• information appliances
• digital audio players
• radio and television service provider

Digital documents usually have to adhere to a specific file format in order to be useful.

That documents cannot be defined by their transmission medium

In law[link]

Documents in all forms are frequently found to be material evidence in criminal and civil proceedings. The forensic analysis of such a document falls under the scope of questioned document examination. For the purpose of cataloging and managing the large number of documents that may be produced in the course of a law suit, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents so that each document has a unique, aribitrary identifying number.

See also[link]

Related concepts:

• Data storage device: to store documents.
• Document automation
• Document collaboration
• Document-centric collaboration
• Document file format: a standard used for represent the document into a storage device.
• Media type: document parts (text block, illustration, audio sample, etc.) can use different media types to store and "display" it.
• Internet of Things
• Realia (library science)
• Subject (documents)

Other related articles:

• Historical document
• Desktop publishing
• Word processor
• Documentary film
• Documentation science

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Documents

• Briet, S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Documentaires Industrielles et Techniques.

• Buckland, M. (1991). Information and information systems. New York: Greenwood Press.

• Frohmann, Bernd (2009). Revisiting "what is a document?", Journal of Documentation, 65(2), 291-303.

• Hjerppe, R. (1994). A framework for the description of generalized documents. Advances in Knowledge Organization, 4, 173-180.

• Houser, L. (1986). Documents: The domain of library and information science. Library and Information Science Research, 8, 163-188.

• Larsen, P.S. (1999). Books and bytes: Preserving documents for posterity. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(11), 1020-1027.

• Lund, N. W. (2008). Document theory. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 399-432.

• Riles, A. (Ed.) (2006). Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

• Schamber, L. (1996). What is a document? Rethinking the concept in uneasy times. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47, 669-671.

• Signer, Beat: What is Wrong with Digital Documents? A Conceptual Model for Structural Cross-Media Content Composition and Reuse, In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2010), Vancouver, Canada, November 2010.

• Ørom, A. (2007). The concept of information versus the concept of document. I: Document (re)turn. Contributions from a research field in transition. Ed. By Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund & Andreas Vårheim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (pp. 53–72).

The word asshole, a variant of arsehole, which is still prevalent in British and Australian English, is a vulgar to describe the anus, often pejoratively used to refer to people.

History[link]

The word arse in English derives from the Germanic root *arsaz, which originated from the Proto-Indo-European root *ors — meaning buttocks or backside.^[1] The combined form arsehole is first attested from 1500 in its literal use to refer to the anus. The metaphorical use of the word to refer to the worst place in a region, e.g., "the arsehole of the world") is first attested in print in 1865; the use to refer to a contemptible person is first attested in 1933.^[2] In the ninth chapter of his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, Richard Wright quotes a snippet of verse that uses the term: "All these white folks dressed so fine / Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...". Its first appearance as an insult term in a newspaper indexed by Google News is in 1965.^[3] As with other vulgarities, these uses of the word may have been common in oral speech for some time before their first print appearances. By the 1970s, Hustler magazine featured people they did not like as "Asshole of the Month."^[4] In 1972, Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers recorded his song "Pablo Picasso," which includes the line "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole."

Until the early 1990s, the word was considered one of a number of words that could not be uttered on commercial television in the United States. Comedian Andrew Dice Clay caused a major shock when he uttered the word during a televised MTV awards show in 1989.^[5] However, there were PG-13 and R rated films in the 1980s that featured use of the word, such as the R-rated The Terminator (1984), the PG-13-rated National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), and the PG-rated Back to the Future (1985). By 1994, however, vulgarity had become more acceptable, and the word was featured in dialog on the long-running television series NYPD Blue, though it has yet to become anything close to commonplace on network TV. In some broadcast edits (such as the syndication airings of South Park), the word is partially bleeped out — ironically, as "assh—", with the profane half of the word intact.

Semantics[link]

The word is mainly used as a vulgarity, generally to describe people who are viewed as stupid or incompetent or detestable.^[6]

This word or its literal translation is found in colloquial speech in a number of cultures (in both English and other languages).^[7] This is because it describes an organ of elimination that is considered a taboo region (since it belongs to the intimate parts) of the body in many societies.^[8]

The English word ass (meaning donkey, a cognate of its zoological name Equus asinus) may also be used as a term of contempt, referring to a silly or stupid person. In the United States, and, to a lesser degree, in Canada, the words arse and ass have become synonymous; however, in the rest of the English-speaking world, ass still only refers to the donkey, rather than the arse (buttocks). It is worth noting that speakers of some varieties of English "drop their Rs" before consonants, leading to a pronunciation of arse that is quite similar to ass.^[9]

Political usage[link]

In 2000, during a Labor Day event, then candidate George W. Bush made an off-hand remark to his running mate, Dick Cheney, that New York Times reporter Adam Clymer was a "major league asshole." The gaffe was caught on microphone and led to a political advertisement chiding Bush for "using expletives ... in front of a crowd of families," produced for Democratic opponent Al Gore.^[10]

In February 2004, American media reported that during a rally of supporters, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Bush "an asshole" for believing his aides in supporting a coup against Chavez in 2002.^[11] The word in the original Spanish was "pendejo", and in news coverage the word was widely, though incorrectly, translated as "asshole"; the meaning of the word varies substantially in Latin America, and in Venezuela its meaning is closer to "fool".^[12] The following year, in September, Nightline host Ted Koppel said to Chavez on national television, "I'm going to perhaps shock you a little, but these are your words. You called President Bush an asshole," to which Chavez replied, "I've said various things about him. I don't know if I actually used that word."^[13]

See also[link]

• Arse
• The No Asshole Rule
• Sexual Slang
• Profanity

References[link]