object

n. An item that is tangible, especially one with significant depth relative to its height and width; an artifact or specimen. ComputingA collection of data with defined boundaries that is treated as a single entity; a resource; a digital object. - 3 ComputingAn instantiation of a class or entity that forms a component of a system.

Notes

Object1 connotes something that has substantial height, width, and depth. While documents have three dimensions and fall under the broadest sense of 'object', they are often distinguished from objects because of their flat, nearly two-dimensional nature. In museums, 'object' connotes something manmade and is synonymous with 'artifact'. - Object2 is used generically to cover a variety of things, object referring to graphics and data files that can be inserted into a larger container using object linking and embedding (OLE) techniques. - Object3 is derived from object-oriented programming. An object is a particular occurrence (instantiation) of a class template. The object contains data in structures defined by the template. The object responds to messages based on internal procedures (methods), either by changing its internal data values or by returning some value based on existing data. Smalltalk and C++ are examples of object-oriented programming languages.