1. A person (such as an actor or musician or celebrity) brought from a foreign country.
2. Goods or services bought from a foreign country.
Product or service that one country purchases from another for domestic consumption, or for processing and reexporting (Hong Kong, for example, is heavily dependent on imports for its export business). Imports may be visible (goods) or invisible (services). If an importing country does not have a counterbalancing value of exports, it may experience balance-of-payments difficulties and accordingly consider restricting imports by some form of protectionism (such as an import tariff or import quotas).
consequence · implication · importation · importee · meaning · moment · significance · signification
To bring in from abroad.
To bring information from one system or program into another. The system or program receiving the data must somehow support the internal format or structure of the data. Conventions such as the TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) and PICT formats (for graphics files) make importing easier. See also PICT, TIFF. Compare export.