[syn: indentation, indention, indent, indenture]
4. the act of cutting into an edge with toothlike notches or angular incisions;
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Indentation \In`den*ta"tion\, n.
1. The act of indenting or state of being indented.
[1913 Webster]
2. A notch or recess, in the margin or border of anything;
as, the indentations of a leaf, of the coast, etc.
[1913 Webster]
3. A recess or sharp depression in any surface.
[1913 Webster]
4. (Print.)
(a) The act of beginning a line or series of lines at a
little distance within the flush line of the column or
page, as in the common way of beginning the first line
of a paragraph.
(b) The measure of the distance; as, an indentation of one
em, or of two ems.
[1913 Webster]
Hanging indentation, or Reverse indentation, indentation
of all the lines of a paragraph except the first, which is
a full line; also called a hanging indent.
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
indentation
n 1: a concave cut into a surface or edge (as in a coastline)
[syn: indentation, indenture]
2: the formation of small pits in a surface as a consequence of
corrosion [syn: pitting, roughness, indentation]
3: the space left between the margin and the start of an
indented line [syn: indentation, indention, indent,
indenture]
4: the act of cutting into an edge with toothlike notches or
angular incisions
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 January 2023):
indentation
indent
Space and/or tab characters added at the
beginning of a line to indicate structure, e.g. indenting a
quotation to make it stand out or indenting a block of code
controlled by an if statement.
Indentation is important in source code for readability. There
are a number of different indent styles. Some programming
languages go further and use indentation as the main method to
represent block structure to the compiler or interpreter, see
off-side rule.
(2008-10-23)