attention
n.-
1 care or interest (n.) B1 Intermediatespecial care or help that you give to someone or something.
notice, care, or consideration given to someone or something, often implying a helpful or romantic interest.
ExampleThe old house needs a lot of attention before we can move in.
ExampleThe patient required constant medical attention following the surgery to ensure no complications arose during the initial recovery phase.
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2 military posture (n.) B2 Upper Intermediate Formal Militarya way of standing very straight and still in the army.
a formal military posture in which the individual stands upright with heels together, arms at the sides, and eyes front.
ExampleThe soldiers stood at attention while the general walked past them.
ExampleThe recruits were ordered to stand at attention for thirty minutes during the inspection, remaining perfectly motionless despite the heat.
UsageCommonly used in the phrase 'at attention'.
- at ease
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3 computing/AI (n.) C1 Advanced Technical Computinga way for computer programs to focus on the most important parts of data.
a mechanism in neural networks that mimics cognitive attention by weighing the importance of different parts of the input data.
ExampleThe new AI model uses an attention mechanism to translate languages better.
ExampleThe introduction of the attention layer allowed the transformer architecture to process long-range dependencies in text more effectively than previous models.
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂éd Proto-Italic *ad Proto-Italic *ad- Latin ad- Proto-Indo-European *ten- Proto-Indo-European *tend-der. Proto-Italic *tendō Latin tendō Latin attendō Proto-Indo-European *-tisder. Proto-Italic *-tjō Latin -tiō Latin attentiōbor. Middle English attencioun English attention From Middle English attencioun, borrowed from Latin attentio, attentionis, from attendere, past participle attentus (“to attend, give heed to”); see attend. Equivalent to attend + -tion.