Meaning & use

subset

noun·Academic

A smaller group or part of a larger set, whose members all belong to that larger set.

See it in a sentence

Only a small subset of the survey respondents had ever traveled abroad.

In mathematics, the set of even numbers is a subset of the set of all integers.

A note on using this word

Subset is used in everyday writing for any smaller portion of a group, but has a precise technical meaning in mathematics and set theory.

Words with a similar meaning

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