The work done concerning object oriented frameworks is in its beginning and most of it tend to concentrate on object oriented frameworks that has been built and how these were built and documented. But there is one question that remains unsatisfactorily answered, i.e. what is a object oriented framework? This is still one of the most common questions and there still exists no answer that is generally agreed on. In this paper some important characteristics of object oriented frameworks are presented, existing definitions discussed and an improved definition is suggested.