Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A unit of acoustic absorption equivalent to the absorption by one square foot of a surface that absorbs all incident sound.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun acoustics A unit of measurement, in the International System of Units (SI), that measures a material's absorbance of sound. A material that is 1 square meter in size that can absorb 100% of sound has a value of one metric sabin.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[After Wallace Clement Ware Sabine, (1868–1919), American physicist.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Wallace Clement Sabine (1868-1919), US physicist.

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Examples

Comments

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  • See WordNet definition above. A sabin was first called an open window unit because it represents the sound absorption of one square foot of a perfectly absorbing surface--such as an open window. Named after Wallace Sabine, a Harvard professor who founded the systematic study of acoustics around 1895.

    November 7, 2007

  • WordNet 3 is the only time I've encountered this word.

    December 8, 2008

  • You mean it's not named after Sabine, the teenage witch?

    December 9, 2008