sample

Etymology

From Middle English saumple, sample, from Old French essample (“example”), from Latin exemplum. Doublet of example and exemplum.

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.
   a blood sample
   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. 1869, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, “Quo Warranto?”, in Lorna Doone, page 99
   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. 2014-05-07, Anh Do, “War orphan named 'Precious Pearl' reunites with South Vietnamese soldier who rescued her in '72”, in The Sydney Morning Herald
2. (statistics) A subset of a population selected for measurement, observation or questioning, to provide statistical information about the population.
   Large samples are generally more reliable than small samples due to having less variability.
   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. 1883, Sir Francis Galton et al., “Final Report of the Anthropometric Committee”, in Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, page 269
3. (cooking) A small quantity of food for tasting, typically given away for free.
4. (business) A small piece of some goods, for determining quality, colour, etc., typically given away for free.
5. (music) Gratuitous borrowing of easily recognised phases (or moments) from other music (or movies) in a recording.
   Jeffrey conceives a fascination with nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who sings Blue Velvet, while her abusive, misogynist sugar-daddy Frank (Dennis Hopper) watches, caressing a sample of this same material. 2016-12-01, Peter Bradshaw, “Blue Velvet review – still inventive, sexy and bizarre”, in The Guardian
6. (obsolete) Example; pattern.
   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. 1600, Torquato Tasso, translated by Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recouerie of Ierusalem, London: Ar. Hatfield, translation of La Gerusalemme liberata (in Italian), book XI, page 200

verb

1. (transitive) To take or to test a sample or samples of.
   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. 1893, Mark Twain, “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note”, in The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other Stories, pages 2–3
   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. 1895, Frank Richard Stockton, “Mok as a Vocalist”, in The Adventures of Captain Horn, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, published 1907, page 367
   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. 1960 March, G. Freeman Allen, “Europe's most luxurious express - the "Settebello"”, in Trains Illustrated, page 140
   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. 2005, Ted LoCascio, InDesign CS2 at Your Fingertips, page 46
   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. 2008, Mark Fitzgerald, Photoshop CS3 Restoration and Retouching Bible, page 148
2. (transitive, signal processing) To reduce a continuous signal (such as a sound wave) to a discrete signal.
3. (music, transitive) To reuse a portion of (an existing sound recording) in a new piece of music.
   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. 2011, Kembrew McLeod, Peter DiCola, Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, page 130
4. (transitive, computer graphics) To make or show something similar to a sample.
   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. 2006, Translation of Digital Process to Architectural Program, page 6