<p><strong>Noun</strong></p><ul><li>plural ma·tri·ces.</li><li>something that constitutes the place or point from which something else originates, takes form, or develops: The Greco-Roman world was the matrix for Western civilization.</li><li>Anatomy. a formative part, as the corium beneath a nail.</li><li>Biology. the intercellular substance of a tissue.</li><li>ground substance.</li><li>Petrology. the fine-grained portion of a rock in which coarser crystals or rock fragments are embedded.</li><li>fine material, as cement, in which lumps of coarser material, as of an aggregate, are embedded.</li><li>Mining. gangue.</li><li>Metallurgy. a crystalline phase in an alloy in which other phases are embedded.</li><li>Printing. a mold for casting typefaces.</li><li>master.</li><li>Digital Technology a grid formed by perpendicular intersections that define potential space that may be filled, as by pixels on a screen, ink in dot-matrix printing, or material in 3D printing.</li><li>(in a press or stamping machine) a multiple die or perforated block on which the material to be formed is placed.</li><li>Mathematics. a rectangular array of numbers, algebraic symbols, or mathematical functions, especially when such arrays are added and multiplied according to certain rules.</li><li>Linguistics. a rectangular display of features characterizing a set of linguistic items, especially phonemes, usually presented as a set of columns of plus or minus signs specifying the presence or absence of each feature for each item.</li><li>Also called master. a mold made by electroforming from a disk recording, from which other disks may be pressed.</li><li>Archaic. the womb.</li></ul>