subfieldn.
/ˈsʌbfiːld/, U.S. /ˈsəbˌfild/ 1. A secondary or subsidiary field or area of land.
ΚΠ
1860 Amer. Cotton Planter Feb. 58/2 A man perfects himself by working; foul jungles are cleared away, fair sub-fields rise instead.
1903 A. C. True & D. J. Crosby Instr. in Agronomy at some Agric. Colleges 54 Forty acres are divided into subfields of exactly 5 acres each.
1962 Adv. in Agronomy 14 72 An essential part of rice culture is to have the soil surface as level as possible within each subfield.
1996 Rev. Agric. Econ. 18 525/2 The field is divided into a finite number of discrete subfields or management units.
2002 C. Merchant Columbia Guide to Amer. Environmental Hist. iv. 61 Each sub-field in succession was then allowed to lie fallow for the third year, to recover its nutrients.
2.
a. A secondary or subordinate field or area of study, research, etc.
ΘΚΠ
society > education > learning > study > subject or object of study > [noun] > ancillary subject
subfield1894
tool subject1934
the mind > mental capacity > perception or cognition > faculty of ideation > topic, subject-matter > affair, business, concern > [noun] > field of interest > division of
province1690
subfield1894
subdiscipline1912
1894 Ann. Universal Med. Sci. 2 a-16 This sub-field of aphasia [sc. amusia].
1902 W. James Varieties Relig. Experience ix. 195 For them the soul is only a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field a part, or sub-field.
1964 J. Gould & W. L. Kolb Dict. Social Sci. 510/2 Political behaviour has come to be regarded as a sub-field, within the social sciences.
2002 S. Rosendale Greening of Literary Scholarship xv. Environmental literary criticism..is on the verge of becoming an important subfield of literary scholarship.
b. Mathematics. A field (field n.1 16a) forming a subset of another field with the same binary operations.
ΘΚΠ
the world > relative properties > number > mathematical number or quantity > numerical arrangement > [noun] > set > in abstract algebra > field
field1893
subfield1910
splitting field1942
1910 Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 11 487 We now consider a field relative to a given subfield of this field.
1940 E. T. Bell Devel. Math. xi. 239 The final outcome may be roughly described as an analysis of the structure of fields with respect to their possible subfields and superfields.
1971 G. Higman in M. B. Powell & G. Higman Finite Simple Groups vi. 209 Q(α) is the real subfield of the field of the 5-th roots of unity.
2005 Ann. Math. 162 585 C is always defined over a finitely generated subfield k′ of k.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, June 2012; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1860