Source : Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

      As the search of it [truth] is the duty, so the invention
      will be the happiness of man.               --Tatham.

   2. That which is invented; an original contrivance or
      construction; a device; as, this fable was the invention
      of Esop; that falsehood was her own invention.

            We entered by the drawbridge, which has an invention
            to let one fall if not premonished.   --Evelyn.

   3. Thought; idea. --Shak.

   4. A fabrication to deceive; a fiction; a forgery; a
      falsehood.

            Filling their hearers With strange invention.
                                                  --Shak.

   5. The faculty of inventing; imaginative faculty; skill or
      ingenuity in contriving anything new; as, a man of
      invention.

            They lay no less than a want of invention to his
            charge; a capital crime, . . . for a poet is a
            maker.                                --Dryden.

   6. (Fine Arts, Rhet., etc.) The exercise of the imagination
      in selecting and treating a theme, or more commonly in
      contriving the arrangement of a piece, or the method of
      presenting its parts.

   {Invention of the cross} (Eccl.), a festival celebrated May
      3d, in honor of the finding of our Savior's cross by St.
      Helena.