ASSORTMENT

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does assortment mean? 

• ASSORTMENT (noun)
  The noun ASSORTMENT has 2 senses:

1. a collection containing a variety of sorts of things

2. the act of distributing things into classes or categories of the same type

  Familiarity information: ASSORTMENT used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ASSORTMENT (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A collection containing a variety of sorts of things

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Synonyms:

assortment; miscellanea; miscellany; mixed bag; mixture; motley; potpourri; salmagundi; smorgasbord; variety

Context example:

a veritable smorgasbord of religions

Hypernyms ("assortment" is a kind of...):

accumulation; aggregation; assemblage; collection (several things grouped together or considered as a whole)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "assortment"):

grab bag (an assortment of miscellaneous items)

witch's brew; witches' brew; witches' broth (a fearsome mixture)

range (a variety of different things or activities)

selection (an assortment of things from which a choice can be made)

farrago; gallimaufry; hodgepodge; hotchpotch; melange; mingle-mangle; mishmash; oddments; odds and ends; omnium-gatherum; ragbag (a motley assortment of things)

alphabet soup (a confusing assortment)

sampler (an assortment of various samples)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The act of distributing things into classes or categories of the same type

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

assortment; categorisation; categorization; classification; compartmentalisation; compartmentalization

Hypernyms ("assortment" is a kind of...):

grouping (the activity of putting things together in groups)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "assortment"):

indexing (the act of classifying and providing an index in order to make items easier to retrieve)

reclassification (classifying something again (usually in a new category))

relegation (the act of assigning (someone or something) to a particular class or category)

stratification (the act or process or arranging persons into classes or social strata)

taxonomy (practice of classifying plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships)

typology (classification according to general type)

Derivation:

assort (arrange or order by classes or categories)

 Context examples 

Gold, cream, and honey are the most popular colors, but the coat also comes in smoke, dark-grizzle, slate and a multi-color assortment of brown, white and black.

(Lhasa Apso, NCI Thesaurus)

Diverse, mixed, consisting of an assortment of different kinds.

(Miscellaneous, NCI Thesaurus)

A diverse assortment of nascent, immature, unprocessed RNA transcripts synthesized from DNA templates that are found in eukaryotic nuclei before post-transcriptional modifications.

(hnRNA, NCI Thesaurus)

“What an extraordinary assortment!” I exclaimed.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

There was the usual assortment of young men absorbed in themselves, young couples absorbed in each other, married ladies in their babies, and old gentlemen in politics.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Clerks in the express office took charge of him; he was carted about in another wagon; a truck carried him, with an assortment of boxes and parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he was trucked off the steamer into a great railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express car.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)