artifact
11 synonyms for artifact, grouped by meaning and by how common each one is.
Noun — An object made or shaped by a person, especially a tool, ornament or vessel from the past that is studied for what it reveals about a culture.
Synonyms
Everyday swaps
Common words most readers know — safe in any writing.
Less common
Still standard English, but they carry more weight.
Rare, literary or technical
Precise, but they will stand out — check the sense before using one.
Synonyms by Meaning
1. noun
An object made or shaped by a person, especially a tool, ornament or vessel from the past that is studied for what it reveals about a culture.
“The dig produced hundreds of artifacts, mostly pottery fragments and bone needles.”
2. noun
A distortion or false feature that appears in an image, recording or set of results because of the equipment or method used rather than because it exists in the thing being measured.
“The dark ring around the tumour turned out to be a scanning artifact.”
3. noun technical
A file or package produced as an output of a software build or process and stored for later use.
“The pipeline uploads the compiled artifact to the registry after every successful build.”
How to use artifact
The word patterns that sound natural to a native speaker.
Artifact is the standard American spelling; British and Australian writing generally uses artefact for the object sense, though both spellings appear in technical fields.
Etymology
From the Latin phrase arte factum 'made by skill', from ars 'art, skill' and facere 'to make'.
Full origin of artifact →