An office is generally a room or other area where people work, but may also denote a position within an organization with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one's duty. When used as an adjective, the term "office" may refer to business-related tasks. In legal writing, a company or organization has offices in any place that it has an official presence, even if that presence consists of, for example, a storage silo rather than an office.
An office is an architectural and design phenomenon and a social phenomenon, whether it is a small office such as a bench in the corner of a small business of extremely small size (see small office/home office) through entire floors of buildings up to and including massive buildings dedicated entirely to one company. In modern terms an office usually refers to the location where white-collar workers are employed.
Read more about Office: History of Offices, Office Spaces, Office Structure, Office Buildings, Office and Retail Rental Rates, Grading
Famous quotes containing the word office:
“The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (17891851)
“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
—David Hume (17111776)
“We often see malefactors, when they are led to execution, put on resolution and a contempt of death which, in truth, is nothing else but fearing to look it in the faceso that this pretended bravery may very truly be said to do the same good office to their mind that the blindfold does to their eyes.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (16131680)