1890 C. L. Morgan Animal Life & Intell. 322 We may call the process..isolation, and the products of the process we may term isolates.

1934 Nature 8 Dec. 889/2 The method of science to search for useful isolates may easily lead the scientific worker to overlook the reactions of his social environment on his own scientific work.

1937 D. J. B. Hawkins Causality & Implication iii. 57 Perhaps it will be best to use the term isolate, meaning what is isolated in thought but referring specifically to the factual element which is thus isolated. Isolate is an appropriate name for any conceptual object in itself, whether it be a simple character or a complex of characters.

1950 J. E. L. Farradane in Jrnl. Documentation June 87 An item of knowledge will thus be an object..or an abstract..which is clearly and, at its own level of complexity, uniquely definable, as far as may be possible. Any other item would in reality be composed of two or more concepts, leading to logical confusions. Let us call these items, as defined, isolates.

1951 S. F. Nadel Found. Social Anthropol. v. 75 In this sense no legitimate isolate can be discovered more basic than that of a standardized pattern of behaviour rendered unitary and relatively self-contained.

1956 R. Redfield Peasant Society & Culture 7 The primitive isolate, the community that is a whole all by itself,..became the model of research.

1958 Antiquity 32 148 Cultural isolates from archaeological material.

1961 Encounter May 74 ‘Homosexuality’ is a false isolate, a term covering a number of conditions.

1964 C. D. Needham Organizing Knowl. in Libr. vii. 71 The isolates now need grouping so that those which are related are proximate.

1969 A. C. Foskett Subj. Approach to Information i. v. 56 Copper as a topic taken out of context is an isolate, but if we place it in a facet in a particular basic class we can refer to it as a focus.

1972 Jrnl. Social Psychol. 86 109 Ss reported that the isolate reduced the homogeneity.

1923 W. A. Poucher Perfumes & Cosmetics iii. 214 It is usual to combine both with a natural isolate of rose odour such as geraniol.

1949 R. W. Moncrieff Chem. Perfumery Materials i. ii. 29 Most of the alcohols used in the perfume industry are isolates rather than synthetics.

1957 E. Sagarin Cosmetics xxxiii. 743 Of the chemical bodies used in perfumery, the isolates from plant oils bear the strongest resemblance to the plant materials themselves.

1931 W. B. Brierley in Ann. Appl. Biol. XVIII. 421 The procedure I adopt in my Botrytis work is as follows. Each separate pure culture made by direct isolation from fresh material, whether a number of cultures are made from a single lesion or from one or more host plants, I term an Isolate. If the first culture direct from the diseased tissue contains, as is very often the case, two or more types, the pure or single-spore isolations from this mixture and not the first impure culture are the isolates. Each isolate is an individual line and sub-cultures are merely duplicates or replicates of that isolate or line. The isolate is the nearest equivalent to Lotsy's ‘species’.

1949 H. W. Florey et al. Antibiotics I. i. 66 Many surveys for antibiotic activity have been performed on type-culture collections of fungi and on new isolates.

1958 New Biol. 27 63 It seems to be no easier to establish experimental infections with isolates of Candida albicans derived from epidemic outbreaks than with isolates from any other source.

1971 E. Afr. Standard (Nairobi) 13 Apr. 9/8 Identification of isolates and antisera received from associate laboratories in Senegal..continued.

1972 Nature 17 Mar. 122/1 In an investigation of this increased severity, isolates of Ceratocystis ulmi were made from infected trees in the outbreak regions.

1942 Psychol. Bull. 39 458 Differences in inter~personal capacity for participation with others, differences which are revealed when the personalities of isolates and leaders are studied.

1953 J. L. Moreno Who shall Survive? i. 100 A rough classification of the position of the individual in the groups was possible—the isolates, the pairs, and the bunch that clung to the leader.

1963 T. Morris & P. Morris Pentonville vii. 174 The retreatist is difficult to detect because he is an isolate.

1966 T. Pynchon Crying of Lot 49 v. 113 Nobody knows anybody else's name... We're isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it.

1968 Observer 14 Apr. (Colour Suppl.) 36/1 Woolly monkeys..who..live on as ‘pets’ become desocialised, isolates.

1969 Sunday Times 16 Mar. (Colour Suppl.) 23/4 Social isolates..often become so careless of their own welfare that they become undernourished.

1970 New Scientist 14 May 319/1 In previous attempts at social rehabilitation, normal monkeys of the same age as the isolates were placed in the cage with them. But the isolate ignored its visitor.

1948 G. Dahlberg in Adv. Genetics II. 92 Recessive mutations will come to the fore more quickly in a population built up of small isolates than in one composed of large ones.

1967 M. E. Hale Biol. Lichens iv. 62 The form and appearance of colonies of different mycobionts and even different isolates of the same mycobiont vary considerably.

1969 E. Mayr Princ. Systematic Zool. iii. 49 Isolates are frequently of sufficient difference to merit subspecies rank.

1949 Trans. Philol. Soc. 1948 128 For the purpose of distinguishing prosodic systems from phonematic systems, words will be my principal isolates.

1961 R. B. Long Sentence & its Parts i. 20 Isolates sometimes take adjunct modifiers, much as nucleuses do. Adjuncts are italicized in the following sentences. Thanks very much. Good night, Marian.

1965 W. S. Allen Vox Latina 7 In French, stress is a feature of the word only as an isolate (in which case it falls on the final syllable).

1972 R. R. K. Hartmann & F. C. Stork Dict. Lang. & Linguistics 119/2 Isolate, (a) a single word functioning as a clause.., (b) a term used occasionally as an alternative to segment.