Subset

noun, verb

noun, verb ·2 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A set A such that every element of A is also an element of S.

    "The set of integers is a subset of the set of real numbers."

  2. 2
    a set whose members are members of another set; a set contained within another set wordnet
  3. 3
    A group of things or people, all of which are in a specified larger group.

    "We asked a subset of the population of the town for their opinion."

Verb
  1. 1
    To take a subset of. transitive
  2. 2
    To extract only the portions of (a font) that are needed to display a particular document. transitive

Synonyms

All synonyms
selectionselectionsubclasssubclasssubgroupsubgroup

Example

More examples

"Not all geniuses are engineers, but all engineers are geniuses. The set of all engineers is thus an, unfortunately proper, subset of all geniuses."

Etymology

From sub- + set.

Related phrases

multiplicative subsetproper subsetsubset classifier

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.