[ad. L. fabricātiōn-em, n. of action f. fabricāre to FABRICATE.]
1. The action or process of fabricating (sense 1 of the vb.); construction, fashioning, manufacture; also, a particular branch of manufacture. Now rare.
1677. Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, IV. i. 290. Plato … falls into conjectures, attributing the Effection of the Soul unto the Great God, but the Fabrication of the Body to the Dii ex Deo or Angels.
1710. Berkeley, Princ. Hum. Knowl., I. § 62. Though the Fabrication of all those Parts and Organs be not absolutely necessary to the producing any Effect, yet it is necessary to the producing of things in a constant, regular way, according to the Laws of Nature.
1790. Burke, Fr. Rev., 44. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.
1845. R. W. Hamilton, Pop. Educ., iii. (ed. 2), 37. Our woollen, cotton, and silk fabrications have drawn out an immense amount of artizans.
1863. Lyell, Antiq. Man, 10. They have called the ages of stone, of bronze, and of iron, named from the materials which have each in their turn served for the fabrication of implements.
concr. 1602. Warner, Alb. Eng., Epit. (1612), 356. Besides Seuerus his forced vallie, with other strong and huge labors and fabrications, were reared at seuerall times two walles.
2. In bad sense: The action of fabricating or ‘making up’; the invention (of a statement); the forging (of a document). Also concr. An invention; a false statement; a forgery.
1790. J. Bruce, Source of Nile, II. 151. What is related of the first audience with the king, and many of the following pages, seem to me to be fabrications of people that never have been in Abyssinia.
1819. Sir W. O. Russell, Crimes & Misdemeanours, IV. xxvii. § 1. Not only the fabrication and false making of the whole of a written instrument, but a fraudulent insertion, alteration, or erasure, even of a letter, in any material part of a true instrument, whereby a new operation is given to it, will amount to forgery.
1839. Thirlwall, Greece, I. vii. 257. What is said to have happened might have been invented, and the occasion and motives for the fabrication may be conceived.
1846. Wright, Ess. Mid. Ages, II. xiii. 83. The common account of his death is a mere fabrication. This, however, is rather the fable than the poetry of history.
1880. T. A. Spalding, Elizabethan Demonology, 46. This was the ecclesiastical method of accounting for certain stories, not very creditable to the priesthood, that had too inconvenient a basis of evidence to be dismissed as fabricatious.
