culture [ME] This goes back to Latin colere ‘cultivate’, a word that appeared from the same source in the mid 17th century. In early examples, a culture was ‘a cultivated piece of land’. In Late Middle English the meaning was ‘cultivation of the soil’ and this developed during the early 16th century into ‘cultivation of the mind or manners’. Reference to the arts and other examples of human achievement dates from the early 19th century.