Structuralism is a way of studying things — language, stories, myths, whole societies — that says the meaning of any single part comes from how it sits among the other parts, not from the part by itself. The usual teaching example is language: 'hot' means what it means because 'warm' and 'cold' exist beside it. Move the neighbours and the meaning moves. Take out one piece and study it alone and you have lost the thing that made it mean anything. The idea starts with the Swiss linguist Saussure in the early 1900s and spreads outward — Lévi-Strauss reading myths, Barthes reading adverts and films. It was the big idea in the humanities for a few decades, then people pushed back: it can feel cold, it treats systems as if they never change, and it has little to say about history or about the individual person. That pushback is where 'post-structuralism' comes from. Today you meet the word mainly in university reading, and often in a slightly critical tone. It is uncountable, and it is not capitalised.

結構主義（語言學、人類學、文學理論的一個學派）。核心想法是：一個東西的意思來自它在整個系統裡跟其他東西的關係，不是它自己本身。台灣人文社科課本就是用這四個字。