selection

noun

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.

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. The 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. The free selection before survey of crown land in some Australian colonies under land legislation introduced in the 1860s.
11. The stage of a genetic algorithm in which individual genomes are chosen from a population for later breeding.
12. Ellipsis 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.”