selection

nouncommon in dialogue

//səˈlɛkʃən//

The process or act of selecting.

noun

1
The process or act of selecting.
The large number of good candidates made selection difficult.
2
Something selected.
My final selection was a 1934 Chateau Lafite.
3
A variety of items taken from a larger collection.
I've brought a selection of fine cheeses to go with your wine.
4
A musical piece.
For my next selection, I'll play Happy Birthday in F-sharp minor.
5
A set of data obtained from a database using a query.
6
The ability of predicates to determine the semantic content of their arguments.
7
A list of items on which user operations will take place.
8
A unary operation that denotes a subset of a relation.
9
historicalThe free selection before survey of crown land in some Australian colonies under land legislation introduced in the 1860s.
Our selection adjoined a sheep-run on the Darling Downs, and boasted […] a forest of box-trees, a stock-yard, and six acres under barley[.]
10
historicalThe free selection before survey of crown land in some Australian colonies under land legislation introduced in the 1860s. A plot of land, or farm, thus selected.
11
The stage of a genetic algorithm in which individual genomes are chosen from a population for later breeding.
12
Variant of natural selectionEllipsis of natural selection.
Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin sēlēctiō (“the act of choosing out, selection”), from sēligō (“choose out, select”), from sē- (“apart”) + legō (“gather, select”). Equivalent to select + -ion.

Forms

plural: selections

select · Privileged, specially selected.Select · A button (of a joystick, joypad or similar device) that, when…selected · That have been selected or chosen.

selection · The process or act of selecting.

selective · Of or relating to the process of selection.Selena · A female given name from Ancient Greek.self · Myself, oneself.

The neighbouring pages — Alphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.