foliation

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The state of being in leaf.
• noun Decoration with sculpted or painted foliage.
• noun Architecture Decoration of an opening with cusps and foils, as in Gothic tracery.
• noun The act, process, or product of forming metal into thin leaf or foil.
• noun The act or process of coating glass with metal foil.
• noun The process of numbering consecutively the leaves of a book or manuscript.
• noun The leaves so numbered.
• noun Geology The set of layers visible in many metamorphic rocks as a result of the flattening and stretching of mineral grains during metamorphism.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The leafing of plants; vernation; the disposition of the nascent leaves within the bud; also, leafage; foliage.
• noun A leaf or scale.
• noun The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, or foil.
• noun The act or operation of spreading foil over the surface of a piece of glass to form a mirror.
• noun The state of being foliaceous or foliated.
• noun In geology, an arrangement of the constituent minerals of a rock in thinly lamellar or often scale-like forms, the result of which is that the mass splits easily in a certain definite direction.
• noun In architecture, enrichment with ornamental cusps or groups of cusps, as in the tracery of medieval windows; foils collectively; feathering.
• noun Arrangement by leaves; specifically, a numbering of the leaves of a book instead of the pages.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The process of forming into a leaf or leaves.
• noun The manner in which the young leaves are dispo�ed within the bud.
• noun The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, foil, or lamina.
• noun The act of coating with an amalgam of tin foil and quicksilver, as in making looking-glasses.
• noun (Arch.) The enrichment of an opening by means of foils, arranged in trefoils, quatrefoils, etc.; also, one of the ornaments. See Tracery.
• noun (Geol.) The property, possessed by some crystalline rocks, of dividing into plates or slabs, which is due to the cleavage structure of one of the constituents, as mica or hornblende. It may sometimes include slaty structure or cleavage, though the latter is usually independent of any mineral constituent, and transverse to the bedding, it having been produced by pressure.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The process of forming into a leaf or leaves.
• noun The manner in which the young leaves are disposed within the bud.
• noun The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, foil, or lamina.
• noun The act of coating with an amalgam of tin foil and quicksilver, as in making looking-glasses.
• noun The enrichment of an opening by means of foils, arranged in trefoils, quatrefoils, etc.; also, one of the ornaments.
• noun The property, possessed by some crystalline rocks, of dividing into plates or slabs, which is due to the cleavage structure of one of the constituents, as mica or hornblende. It may sometimes include slaty structure or cleavage, though the latter is usually independent of any mineral constituent, and transverse to the bedding, it having been produced by pressure.
• noun topology A set of submanifolds of a given manifold, each of which is of lower dimension than it, but which, taken together, are coextensive with it.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the work of coating glass with metal foil
• noun the production of foil by cutting or beating metal into thin leaves
• noun (geology) the arrangement of leaflike layers in a rock
• noun (botany) the process of forming leaves
• noun (architecture) leaf-like architectural ornament