Academy

1. n. A school or place of training in which some special art is taught; as, the military academy at West Point; a riding academy; the Academy of Music.
2. n. A garden or grove near Athens (so named from the hero Academus), where Plato and his followers held their philosophical conferences; hence, the school of philosophy of which Plato was head.
3. n. An institution for the study of higher learning; a college or a university. Popularly, a school, or seminary of learning, holding a rank between a college and a common school.
4. n. A place of training; a school.
5. n. A society of learned men united for the advancement of the arts and sciences, and literature, or some particular art or science; as, the French Academy; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; academies of literature and philology.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.