noun A solid upright structure designed usually to support a larger structure above it, such as a roof or horizontal beam, but sometimes for decoration.
noun A vertical line of entries in a table, usually read from top to bottom.
noun A body of troops or army vehicles, usually strung out along a road.
noun A body of text meant to be read line by line, especially in printed material that has multiple adjacent such on a single page.
It was too hard to read the text across the whole page, so I split it into two columns.
noun A unit of width, especially of advertisements, in a periodical, equivalent to the width of a usual column of text.
Each column inch costs $300 a week; this ad is four columns by three inches, so will run $3600 a week.
noun A recurring feature in a periodical, especially an opinion piece, especially by a single author or small rotating group of authors, or on a single theme.
His initial foray into print media was as the author of a weekly column in his elementary-school newspaper.
noun Something having similar vertical form or structure to the things mentioned above, such as a spinal column.