sampling

Verb

sample (third-person singular simple present samples, present participle sampling, simple past and past participle sampled)

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
2. (transitive) To reduce a continuous signal (such as a sound wave) to a discrete signal.
3. (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...2011, Kembrew McLeod, Peter DiCola, Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, →ISBN, page 130
4. (transitive) 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, →ISBN, page 6

See all 11 meanings of sample