Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary - arsonist

(arsonists) An arsonist is a person who deliberately sets fire to a building or vehicle. N-COUNT ART (arts) Frequency: The word is one of the 700 most common words in English. 1. Art consists of paintings, sculpture, and other pictures or objects which are created for people to look at and admire or think deeply about. ...the first exhibition of such art in the West. ...contemporary and modern American art. ...Whitechapel Art Gallery. N-UNCOUNT 2. Art is the activity or educational subject that consists of creating paintings, sculptures, and other pictures or objects for people to look at and admire or think deeply about. ...a painter, content to be left alone with her all-absorbing art. ...Farnham College of Art and Design. ...art lessons. N-UNCOUNT 3. The arts are activities such as music, painting, literature, cinema, and dance, which people can take part in for enjoyment, or to create works which express serious meanings or ideas of beauty. Catherine the Great was a patron of the arts and sciences. ...the art of cinema. N-VAR: usu the N in pl 4. At a university or college, arts are subjects such as history, literature, or languages in contrast to scientific subjects. ...arts and social science graduates. ...the Faculty of Arts. N-PLURAL: oft N n 5. Arts or art is used in the names of theatres or cinemas which show plays or films that are intended to make the audience think deeply about the content, and not simply to entertain them. ...the Cambridge Arts Cinema. ADJ: ADJ n 6. If you describe an activity as an art, you mean that it requires skill and that people learn to do it by instinct or experience, rather than by learning facts or rules. Fishing is an art. N-COUNT 7. Art is an old-fashioned form of the second person singular of the present tense of the verb be. 8. see also Bachelor of Arts, fine art, martial art, Master of Arts, state-of-the-art, work of art