1801 T. Fremantle Let. 1 May in A. Fremantle Wynne Diaries (1940) III. 54 Living on such very friendly terms with all the leading features in the Squadron.

1838 Actors by Daylight 1 123 Covent Garden was advertised to open, and Miss Fanny Kemble announced as the feature.

1855 ‘G. Eliot’ in Westm. Rev. 8 iv. 438 The Press has no band of critics who..are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a ‘feature’ in their article.

1933 H. G. Wells Shape of Things to Come i. §9 93 A daily paper..would..have found itself vigorously outdone by more richly endowed competitors, able because of their wealth to buy up all the most attractive features.

1959 Times 5 May 13/5 (advt.) Nowadays it's not so much news as features; features or comment.

1921 A. C. Lescarboura Cinema Handbk. (1922) i. 23 Feature, a pictured story, a plurality of reels in length.

1921 A. C. Lescarboura Cinema Handbk. (1922) x. 351 Paralleling all this is the filming of short features for the news and magazine films.

1930 J. B. Priestley Angel Pavement iv. 177 Then came the film of the evening, the star feature.

1932 N.Y. Times 10 Apr. Mag. 22/3 In England there is more chamber music, more serious drama,..fewer ‘educational features’.

1938 I. Barry in Bardèche & Brasillach Hist. Film 388 Since the advent of sound, feature-length travel and documentary pictures produced commercially have been less evident than formerly.

1941 B.B.C. Gloss. Broadcasting Terms 20 News Feature, programme in which news is presented in radio-dramatic form.

1954 Economist 11 Sept. (Suppl.) 11/1 A BBC feature depicting Folland Aircraft and the Gnat brought a host of small buying orders for Folland shares into the market.

1956 Ann. Reg. 1955 385 The first feature-length cartoon film, Animal Farm.

1965 Listener 20 May 746/3 There is a Robert Mulligan going the circuits as a second feature to Good Neighbour Sam.

1926 Language 2 157 Different morphemes may be alike or partly alike as to vocal features.

1942 Language 18 7 It turns out that some things..are constantly associated in groups of two or more, one appearing wherever the others do. Where this is true, the two or more elements clearly constitute a single unit, one of the minimum units into which the utterances of the range may be analyzed. These units are termed features.

1948 Language 24 33 Some distinctively different segments contain a distinctive combination, or one or more distinctive components in common. The distinctive aspects or components of a segment constitute one or more features of the segment. We use the term ‘feature’ for what is commonly called a distinctive feature of a sound. Features are said to occur in segments; segments are said to contain features.

1952 R. Jakobson et al. (title) Preliminaries to speech analysis: the distinctive features and their correlates.

1952 R. Jakobson et al. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis i. 3 The listener is obliged to choose either between two polar qualities in the same category..or between the presence and absence of a certain quality... The choice between the two opposites may be termed distinctive features.

1957 Trans. Philol. Soc. 1957 122 Referring to the two ways of discriminating elements in the flow of speech—the one, which distinguishes elements as successive (segmentation), and the other, which distinguishes elements as successive or simultaneous (substitution): we establish two fundamental types of element—(i) such as can be isolated by segmentation, to be called ‘segments’, and (ii) such as cannot be, to be called ‘features’.

1968 N. Chomsky & M. Halle Sound Pattern Eng. 66 Our tentative assumption is that the segmental features and the boundary features fall into distinct sets.

1944 Daily Tel. 15 May They have also taken five more hill features and three towns.

1956 J. Masters Bugles & Tiger xviii. 229 M. L. sent my company..up the hill and spread the others out..on smaller features.