surrogate

  1. Noun.  A substitute (usually of a person, position or role).
  2. Noun.  A person or animal that acts as a substitute for the social or pastoral role of another, such as a surrogate mother.
  3. Noun.  (chiefly, British) A deputy for a bishop in granting licences for marriage.
  4. Noun.  (US, _) : A judicial officer of limited jurisdiction, who administers matters of probate and intestate succession and, in some cases, adoptions.
  5. Noun.  A ''surrogate'' or ''surrogate key'' is a unique identifier for either an entity in the modeled world or an object in the database.
  6. Noun.  (computing) Any of a range of Unicode codepoints which are used in pairs in UTF-16 to represent characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane.
  7. Adjective.  Of, concerning, relating to or acting as a substitute.
  8. Verb.  (transitive) To replace or substitute something with something else; appoint a successor.

This is an unmodified, but possibly outdated, definition from Wiktionary and used here under the Creative Commons license. Wiktionary is a great resource. If you like it too, please donate to Wikimedia.

This entry was last updated on RefTopia from its source on 3/20/2012.