sample — English Dictionary

Noun

1. A part or snippet of something taken or presented for inspection, or shown as evidence of the quality of the whole; a specimen.

   Examples

   a blood sample

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   He looked down into Glen Doone first, and sniffed as if he were smelling it, like a sample of goods from a wholesale house; and then he looked at the hills over yonder, and then he stared at me.

   Altogether we spent eight days on the Aparaman Range, exploring and gathering samples of plant and animal life.

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   Then one day in May 2012, he picked up a free sample of a Vietnamese-language magazine based in New Jersey. In it, he saw an article about a career Navy officer named Kimberly Mitchell and her search into her past.

2. A subset or portion of a population that is systematically selected for measurement, observation, or questioning, with the objective of generating statistical information that accurately reflects the characteristics of the entire population.

   Examples

   Large samples are generally more reliable than small samples due to having less variability.

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   It is interesting to find that, with the exception of a few imperfectly-observed South Sea Islanders, and whose actual numbers, if the measurements are correct, are very few, the English professional classes head the long list [in average height], and that the Anglo-Saxon race takes the chief place in it among the civilised communities, although it is possible it might stand second to the Scandinavian countries if a fair sample of their population were obtained.

   It's a pretty grey outlook for England if these are a sample of the mothers of the coming generation.

3. A small quantity of food for tasting, typically given away for free.

4. A small piece of some goods, for determining quality, colour, etc., typically given away for free.

5. A borrowing of easily recognised phases (or moments) from other music (or movies) in a recording.

6. Example; pattern.

   Usage

   • Obsolete

   Examples

   Thus he concludes, and euery hardie knight / His ſample follow’d, and his brethren twaine, / The other Princes put on harneſſe light, / As footmen vſe.

   [The King] Liu’d in Court / (Which rare it is to do) moſt prais’d, moſt lou’d, / A ſample to the yongeſt.

Verb

1. To take or to test a sample or samples of.

   Usage

   • Transitive

   Examples

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   They had just finished their breakfast, and the sight of the remains of it almost overpowered me. I could hardly keep my wits together in the presence of that food, but as I was not asked to sample it, I had to bear my trouble as best I could.

   Mok was enjoying himself very much. It was not often that he had such an opportunity to sample the delights of Paris. His young master, Ralph, had given him strict orders never to go out at night, or in his leisure hours, unless accompanied by Cheditafa.

   It is certainly my personal favourite, for it was by way of Hardwick's great Doric arch that I first sampled the roar and clatter of London streets, the trip being a boyhood reward for achieving (unexpected) success in a school examination!

   I did not really wonder, after sampling the "Settebello's" standards of comfort and service, that even on a midweek day in autumn there was not a seat to spare, despite the cost.

   The Eyedropper tool allows you to sample colors from anywhere in your open InDesign documents (yes, even from placed images!) You can add a sampled color to the Swatches palette and then apply it to the fill or stroke of any frame, shape, path, line, or table.

   The Healing brush is similar to the Clone Stamp in that information is sampled by Alt-clicking and then painted into other parts of the image. The big difference is that the Healing brush attempts to make the sampled data match the lighting and shading of the area to which it's being applied.

2. To reduce a continuous signal (such as a sound wave) to a discrete signal.

   Usage

   • Transitive

3. To reuse a portion of (an existing sound recording) in a new piece of music.

   Usage

   • Transitive

   Examples

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   To address this novel legal quandary, one legal treatise on copyright has developed the concept of fragmented literal similarity, a method of determining whether a sample-based work is substantially similar to the source it sampled. The name reflects the exactness of the similarity between the snippet of a track that is sampled and the sampled copy of that snippet.

4. To make or show something similar to a sample.

   Usage

   • Transitive

   Examples

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   It means that a larger image field can be sampled from a lower resolution copy without much loss in comparative data, only the number of data points to be manipulated.

Noun

1. a small part of something intended as representative of the whole

   Broader terms

   exampleillustrationinstancerepresentative

2. items selected at random from a population and used to test hypotheses about the population

   Synonyms

   sample distributionsampling

   Broader terms

   distributionstatistical distribution

3. all or part of a natural object that is collected and preserved as an example of its class

   Broader terms

   natural object

Verb

1. take a sample of

   Synonyms

   trytry outtaste

   Broader terms

   consumeingesttake intakehave

   Examples

   Try these new crackers

   Sample the regional dishes