n. The act of taking or seizing; seizure; arrest: as, the capture of an enemy, of a ship, or of booty, by force, surprise, or stratagem; the capture of a criminal.n. The thing taken; a prize.To take or seize by force, surprise, or stratagem, as an enemy or his property; take captive; make a prize or prisoner of: as, to capture a vessel or a fortress; to capture prisoners.To win by ingenuity or skill against resistance or competition: as, to capture a prize for marksmanship.n. In physical geography, the process by which a stream, lengthening its valley by head-ward erosion and thus encroaching upon a neighboring drainage-basin of greater altitude, eventually taps another stream, whose upper waters are thus diverted and whose lower waters are left ‘beheaded’: said also of glaciers.In physical geography, to divert part of (a river) to a new course: said of the action of a stream that erodes its valley headward into the basin of another river and thus captures or diverts the upper waters of the latter to its own course.