Raymond Williams defines "culture" as one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. He notes that the etiology of the term  derives from  a range of meanings: "inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship". He suggests that it was originally a noun of process to do with tending, which eventually conflated the dual meanings of natural growth and husbandry, to equate, by the seventeenth Century with human development. From this, the word developed into a noun, culture, meaning an abstract process or a product of such a process. Up until the nineteenth century it was occasionally used as a synonym for civilisation. By the eighteenth century, the noun had acquired definite class associations. According to Williams, the meaning was reified as an element of class distinction through its nineteenth century transformation in the German kultur, denoting civilisation.

The notion of culture as the organic expression of differing social practices - "cultures" (in the de-classified plural) was initiated by Herder, who, in his Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) decried the normative and classed meaning of the term and saw it as an instrument of colonial domination. The main thread of meaning, however seems to have derived from the German etiology in which Kultur has come to mean the independent and abstract noun which indicates a particular way of life, as well as the productions of works of an intellectual or especially artistic activity. This is now the most common usage in theatre, film music, literature and architecture as  a way of describing not only these activities, but the works which sustain them.

Within the fields of social and cultural anthropology, the word has come to be used in the sense of material culture, while in history it invariably connotes the symbolic or signifying systems. In general, Williams suggests two parallel and major meanings. The first is that which is normatively associated with fine art, the other with popular culture. While the former has been more prevalent since the nineteenth century, the latter has gained increasing importance and support in the sense suggested by Herder as a legitimation of decolonisation. Culture therefore has ambiguous and complex meanings. See: Williams R., Keywords - A Vocabulary of Cultures, Fontana Press, London 1983, pp. 87-90.