- the bottom or base of anything; the part on which something stands or rests.
- anything upon which something is based; fundamental principle; groundwork.
- the principal constituent; fundamental ingredient.
- a basic fact, amount, standard, etc., used in making computations, reaching conclusions, or the like: The nurse is paid on an hourly basis. He was chosen on the basis of his college grades.
- a set of linearly independent elements of a given vector space having the property that every element of the space can be written as a linear combination of the elements of the set.
- something that underlies, supports, or is essential to something else, esp an abstract idea
- a principle on which something depends or from which something has issued
- (of a vector space) a maximal set of linearly independent vectors, in terms of which all the elements of the space are uniquely expressible, and the number of which is the dimension of the space
