profile
Definitions
General English
- noun a view of someone’s head, seen from the side
- noun a short biography of a famous person in a newspaper
Aviation
- noun an outline or shape of something, seen from a side view
Cars & Driving
- noun a cross section of a tyre
Commerce
- noun a brief description of the characteristics of something or someone
Computing
- noun a feature of Windows that stores the settings for different users on one PC
Construction
- A drawing showing a vertical section of ground, usually taken along the center line of a highway or other construction project.
- A template used for shaping plaster.
- A guide used in masonry work.
- A British term for batter board.
Media Studies
- noun a description of a person or organisation giving a short history, key facts etc.
- noun the way that the total audience for a broadcast can be broken down according to such factors as age, gender, income etc.
Medical
- noun a brief description of the characteristics of a person or thing
- noun a set of data, usually in graph or table form, which indicates to what extent something has the same characteristics as a group tested or considered standard
- noun the amount that other people notice somebody or something
- verb to give a short description or assessment of somebody or something
Publishing
- noun a brief description of something such as an author or a company
Origin & History of “profile”
The -file of profile is etymologically a ‘thread’. The word comes from early modern Italian profilo, a derivative of profilare ‘draw in outline’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix pro- ‘forward’ and filare, which used to mean ‘draw a line’; and this in turn went back to Latin filāre ‘spin’, a derivative of filum ‘thread’ (from which English gets file for storing things in).
