noun

• (statistics) 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.
  "Large samples are generally more reliable than small samples due to having less variability."
• (cooking) A small quantity of food for tasting, typically given away for free.
• (business) A small piece of some goods, for determining quality, colour, etc., typically given away for free.
• (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."

verb

• (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."
• (transitive, signal processing) To reduce a continuous signal (such as a sound wave) to a discrete signal.
• (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."
• (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."

noun

• (emergency medicine) Initialism of signs and symptoms, allergies, medications, past pertinent history, last oral intake, events leading to present illness.