Sampler

How to spell sampler

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sampler

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sampler mean?

1. nounA small collection of different items offered so a person can try or assess each one.
2. nounA piece of embroidery worked to demonstrate a range of stitches, often framed and displayed.
3. nounAn electronic device that records short segments of sound for playback or musical arrangement.

Sampler in a sentence

• The cafe served a dessert sampler with five tiny portions on one plate.

• Her grandmother stitched a sampler showing the alphabet and a row of flowers.

• The producer loaded a drum loop into the sampler and looped it under the vocals.

• The cosmetics counter handed out a sampler of three perfumes in little vials.

• The museum displayed a faded sampler dated to 1742.

• He bought a cheap sampler to capture sounds from old vinyl records.

Where does sampler come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin exemplum, meaning 'a sample, a model, or an example', the same root that gives us the everyday word 'example'. In medieval times this passed into Old French as essemple and exemplaire, and English took it up as 'sample', a shortened form meaning 'a small representative portion'. By the late 1300s the agent ending '-er' was attached, producing 'sampler' for someone or something that samples. Its most famous early sense was a piece of embroidery worked to display a range of stitches, literally an 'example' of needlework skill, and many such pieces survive from the 1600s onward. The modern meanings, a tasting selection of foods or an electronic device that records sound for replay, all flow from the same idea of a gathered set of representative specimens, which is worth remembering because the spelling preserves the plain 'sample' inside it rather than any tricky vowel.

How the word is built

• sampl- (from sample, ultimately Latin exemplum: example, specimen)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: one that or thing that)