The quality of being selective, or extent to which something is selective.
Used in a Sentence
selectivity
Definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for selectivity.
Editorial note
An index is useful only when the selectivity is very low.
Examples16
Definitions4
Parts of speech1
Quick take
The quality of being selective, or extent to which something is selective.
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of selectivity gathered in one view.
The ability of a radio receiver to separate a desired signal frequency from others.
An approach to social work that prioritizes people perceived as having the most need for assistance.
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for selectivity.
noun
The quality of being selective, or extent to which something is selective.
noun
The ability of a radio receiver to separate a desired signal frequency from others.
noun
An approach to social work that prioritizes people perceived as having the most need for assistance.
noun
(chemistry) Discrimination of a reactant towards a choice of other reactants; the ratio of rate constants for different reactants.
Example sentences
An index is useful only when the selectivity is very low.
It seems to me that prestige is a combination of fame and selectivity; a school is prestigious if everyone has heard of it, but few get in.
But on the other side the evidence selectivity and baseless opinion pieces fighting for mindshare are 100 times worse.
It's more efficient to perform a table scan than using an index if the selectivity of your filter is low.
My understanding, however, is that achieving spatial selectivity has been hard enough with implantable cuff electrodes.
But as these devices become more mass marketed, sensitivity and selectivity become a much bigger concern.
With each dot tuned to a fairly narrow band of light you get good selectivity.
Perhaps one could even use histograms to estimate selectivity of the query's join predicates to pick a good ordering of joins?
GiveDirectly, and similar cash aid programs, generally do not have that kind of perverse selectivity.
Also - a side effect of paying for every site you go to is selectivity.
China has a ratio of 112:100 men to women at birth due to gender selectivity.
It optimizes things around the first $match to create an optimized initial read (the selectivity of your initial stages is really important).
Quote examples
The ear seems to have a built in amplifier using positive feedback - the "cochlear amplifier is the outer hair cell which increases the amplitude and frequency selectivity of sound vibrations using electromechanical feedback."(Wikipedia).
For the attended-in-1976 minority cohort, they found a 6.7% higher income in 2007 for those choosing a more selective – but falling to 1.6% (said by the authors to be "indistinguishable from zero") if the selectivity-outlier historically-black colleges were excluded.
“We have other applications in mind,” he says, to take advantage of the device’s “optical selectivity in a 3-D bulk object.” For example, a block of material could allow only one precise angle and color of light to pass through, while all others would be blocked.
Proper noun examples
Selectivity must be tight before we can issue strong health warnings to masses of people.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use selectivity in a sentence?
An index is useful only when the selectivity is very low.
What does selectivity mean?
The quality of being selective, or extent to which something is selective.
What part of speech is selectivity?
selectivity is commonly used as noun.