museum

plural museums · plural rare musea · alternative archaic musæum

1. A building or institution dedicated to the acquisition, conservation, study, exhibition, and educational interpretation of objects having scientific, historical, cultural or artistic value.

   visit the history museum

   1 more example

   They're opening a new coin exhibition at the local museum.

present singular third person museums · participle present museuming · participle past museumed · past museumed · alternative archaic musæum

1. ambitransitiveTo place in a museum.

   I use daily those books that for others are museumed. The glass case approach depresses me, makes books into porcelain, guts them of what they are.

   2013, Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

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   Such museuming provides evidence that the Gulf has started building up its defences to protect its national culture, which might be seen as threatened by modern, global societies.

   2016, Pamela Erskine-Loftus, Mariam Ibrahim Al-Mulla, Victoria Hightower, Representing the Nation, page 77

   Synonyms: museumize, musealize

2. colloquialintransitiveTo visit museums.

   I told her I'd do just one visit to start; I don't really have time to do a lot of museuming.

   2014, Robin Reardon, Educating Simon, page 212

1. alternativeAlternative form of the Mouseion

   The Museum was thoroughly regarded in the light of an important institution of the state, and after the subjugation of Egypt by the Romans continued to be maintained by the Emperors.

   1873, The American Journal of Education, page 510

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   Alexander never lived to see the city completed but most of the celebrated bildings we know so well by name—the Museum, Soma, Library, Gymnasium, etc.—were the work of the architect he had chosen [...]. / [...] / The Museum, the home of the Muses, was in shadow reproduced by our mediæval universities—not a place where collections of relics of the past were stored up, but where students of literature, science, or art, whether as teachers or taughts, lived together in an atmosphere of intellectual luxury.

   1893, Alfred E. P. Raymund Dowling, “A Walk in Alexandria”, in Littell's Living Age, page 179

   Under Roman supremacy the Museum seems to have developed into a place for higher education, studious youths flocking thither from all parts of the world to enjoy the unrivalled facilities for research which Alexandria offered, and the famous medical school, founded by Hierophilus, still flourished long after other characteristic features of intellectual life had disappeared.

   1894, “The Alexandrian Library and Museum”, in The Columbia Literary Monthly, volume 3, number 3, page 107