Noun
The act of specifying or determining by a mark or limit; notation of limits.
The designation of particulars; particular mention; as, the specification of a charge against an officer.
A written statement containing a minute description or enumeration of particulars, as of charges against a public officer, the terms of a contract, the description of an invention, as in a patent; also, a single article, item, or particular, an allegation of a specific act, as in a charge of official misconduct.
Source: Webster's dictionary57: It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. Alan Perlis
Absolute power by virtue of its very nature withdraws itself from all specification. Theodor Mommsen
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly. Robert Oppenheimer
A representation is a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this. And I shall call the result of using a representation to describe a given entity a description of the entity in that representation. David Marr
Starships, of course, have few limitations with regard to design, the prime specification being simply that they not disintegrate during acceleration or course change. Jack McDevitt
Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. [...] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification. Fred Brooks