state

A state is a political association with effective dominion over a geographic area. It usually includes the set of institutions that claim the authority to make the rules that govern the people of the society in that territory, though its status as a state often depends in part on being recognized by a number of other states as having internal and external sovereignty over it. In sociology, the state is normally identified with these institutions: in Max Weber's influential definition, it is that organization that has a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory," which may include the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy, courts, and police.
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v. be, exist; occur, happen; become; there is, there exists; cost

v. be; stay, remain; stand; sit; rest, lie; live

(a.)
Belonging to the state, or body politic; public.
  

(a.)
Stately.
  

(n.)
A chair with a canopy above it, often standing on a dais; a seat of dignity; also, the canopy itself.
  

(n.)
A form of government which is not monarchial, as a republic.
  

(n.)
A person of high rank.
  

(n.)
A political body, or body politic; the whole body of people who are united one government, whatever may be the form of the government; a nation.
  

(n.)
A statement; also, a document containing a statement.
  

(n.)
Any body of men united by profession, or constituting a community of a particular character; as, the civil and ecclesiastical states, or the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons, in Great Britain. Cf. Estate, n., 6.
  

(n.)
Appearance of grandeur or dignity; pomp.
  

(n.)
Condition of prosperity or grandeur; wealthy or prosperous circumstances; social importance.
  

(n.)
Estate, possession.
  

(n.)
Highest and stationary condition, as that of maturity between growth and decline, or as that of crisis between the increase and the abating of a disease; height; acme.
  

(n.)
In the United States, one of the commonwealth, or bodies politic, the people of which make up the body of the nation, and which, under the national constitution, stands in certain specified relations with the national government, and are invested, as commonwealth, with full power in their several spheres over all matters not expressly inhibited.
  

(n.)
Rank; condition; quality; as, the state of honor.
  

(n.)
The bodies that constitute the legislature of a country; as, the States-general of Holland.
  

(n.)
The circumstances or condition of a being or thing at any given time.
  

(n.)
The principal persons in a government.
  

(v. t.)
To express the particulars of; to set down in detail or in gross; to represent fully in words; to narrate; to recite; as, to state the facts of a case, one's opinion, etc.
  

(v. t.)
To set; to settle; to establish.
  

<storage, architecture, jargon, theory> How something is; its configuration, attributes, condition, or information content. The state of a system is usually temporary (i.e. it changes with time) and volatile (i.e. it will be lost or reset to some initial state if the system is switched off).
A state may be considered to be a point in some space of all possible states. A simple example is a light, which is either on or off. A complex example is the electrical activation in a human brain while solving a problem.
In computing and related fields, states, as in the light example, are often modelled as being discrete (rather than continuous) and the transition from one state to another is considered to be instantaneous. Another (related) property of a system is the number of possible states it may exhibit. This may be finite or infinite. A common model for a system with a finite number of discrete state is a finite state machine.
[Jargon File]
(1996-10-13)