lithography

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

• noun A printing process in which the image to be printed is rendered on a flat surface, as on sheet zinc or aluminum, and treated to retain ink while the nonimage areas are treated to repel ink.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The art of making a picture, design, or writing upon stone in such a manner that ink-impressions can be taken from the work, and of producing such impressions by a process analogous to ordinary printing. Lithography was invented by Aloys Senefelder of Munich, about 1796.

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

• noun The art or process of putting designs or writing, with a greasy material, on stone, and of producing printed impressions therefrom. The process depends, in the main, upon the antipathy between grease and water, which prevents a printing ink containing oil from adhering to wetted parts of the stone not covered by the design. See Lithographic limestone, under lithographic.
• noun a printing process for reproducing images, using any flat surface, such as a metal plate, in a manner similar to lithography{1}.
• noun The process of producing patterns on semiconductor crystals by exposing photosensitive coatings on a matrix, such as silicon, to light patterns in the form desired for the circuit, and subsequently treating (e.g., chemically) the patterns thus formed in such a way as to create integrated semiconductor circuits with the desired properties. This is the principle method (1990's) to create the high-density integrated circuits used in the digital computers on which you are reading this.

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

• noun The process of printing a lithograph on a hard, flat surface; originally the printing surface was a flat piece of stone that was etched with acid to form a surface that would selectively transfer ink to the paper; the stone has now been replaced, in general, with a metal plate.

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

• noun a method of planographic printing from a metal or stone surface
• noun the act of making a lithographic print