BUILDING. Any work of civil architecture while in progress is familiarly termed a building. This substantive use of a participial term may be thought to arise from the old habit of contracting an expression if it be long, and using a part for the whole: "the house or church a building," that is, in the course of building, or now being built, is more commonly spoken of as "a building," or "the building." The term is less correctly applied to edifices generally, without reference to their state of completeness or incompleteness; but this use of it should be avoided, as the term thus becomes less definite, and therefore less valuable.