experiment
Pluralexperiments
Verbexperiments, experimenting, experimented
Pluralexperiments
Formsexperiments, experimenting, experimented
- 1A test carried out under controlled conditions to demonstrate a known fact, check a hypothesis, or find out whether something untried actually works.
The team designed an experiment to test whether the new fertilizer increased crop yields.
Each experiment was repeated three times to confirm the results.
Note
Latin experimentum meant "experience" and "attempt" as well as "experiment," from experior, "to experience, to attempt." English inherited all of those meanings, but today the noun has narrowed to the controlled test. Its usual verbs are conduct, carry out and perform. The chemical experiments in L. E. Landon's Ethel Churchill (1837) show the familiar laboratory setting already in place.
- 2To carry out an experiment in order to test an idea or observe a result.
Researchers experiment constantly, refining their methods after each trial.
She experimented in the lab late into the night, chasing one stubborn result.
Note
The modern verb takes no direct object; what is being tested arrives through a preposition. You experiment on subjects (rats) and experiment with materials or methods, such as the new interior finishes tried out in the Railway Magazine of 1951. In David Brill's 1978 piece for Gay Community News, experimenting loosens further: it means wandering a city freely instead of following a map.
- 3Practical familiarity with something, acquired through direct, repeated experience.
Note
Where English now says experience, Spenser could say experiment. In The Faerie Queene (1590), a pilot fixes his eye on card and compass, "the maisters of his long experiment": the instruments his years at sea have taught him to trust. The phrase preserves the Latin "experience" meaning behind the laboratory sense. Read it this way in older verse, but avoid it in modern writing, where it would be taken for a trial.
Less common meanings
- 4To test or determine something by trying it out; to make a trial of it.
Til they had experimented whiche was trewe, and who knewe most.
1481, The Mirrour of the World, William CaxtonNote
Here the old verb took whatever was on trial as a direct object, and the object could even be a question. Caxton's The Mirrour of the World (1481) describes people who "experimented whiche was trewe," testing to find out which was true. Modern English keeps the idea but drops the construction. It says test or try out instead, or uses the prepositional verb with on or with.
- 5To experience, feel, perceive, or detect something.
Sailors far from home experiment a longing no words can name.
The Earth, the which may have carried us about perpetually ... without our being ever able to experiment its rest.
1662, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogue 2)Note
This verb describes perception, not procedure. To experiment something was to feel or notice it, just as the noun once meant practical experience. Thomas Salusbury's 1662 translation of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems says the Earth may carry us about "without our being ever able to experiment its rest," meaning without our ever perceiving its stillness. Read it as experience or perceive; written today, it would look like a mistake.
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Origin
It comes through Middle English experiment and Old French esperiment from Latin experimentum ("experience, attempt, experiment"). That word derives from experior ("to experience, to attempt"), formed from ex plus *perior, which traces back to Proto-Indo-European *per-.