The word "infrastructure" has been used in French since 1875 and in English since 1887, originally meaning "installations that form the basis for any operation or system". It is a loanword from French, where it was already use… See more

A 1987 US National Research Council panel adopted the term "public works infrastructure", referring to:
"... both specific functional modes – highways, streets, roads, and bridges; mass transi… See more

Engineers generally limit the term "infrastructure" to describe fixed assets that are in the form of a large network; in other words, hard infrastructure. Efforts to devise more generic definitions of infrastructures have typica… See more