Examining resemblances or differences

Usage examples of comparing.

Let's begin by comparing the acceptability of different inventions within the same society.

We can infer the answer to this question by comparing modern societies at different levels of organization, by examining written accounts or archaeological evidence about past societies, and by observing how a society's institutions change over time.

The solution is to reconstruct the vocabularies of vanished ancient languages (so-called protolanguages) by comparing vocabularies of modern languages derived from them.

Nevertheless, as long as one understands that the table is a simplification, it is useful for comparing continental histories.

While those conclusions rest on archaeological evidence, there is also an independent method for dating the arrival of domestic plants and animals: by comparing the words for them in modern languages.

While neither astronomers studying galaxy formation nor human historians can manipulate their systems in controlled laboratory experiments, they both can take advantage of natural experiments, by comparing systems differing in the presence or absence (or in the strong or weak effect) of some putative causative factor.

For example, epidemiologists, forbidden to feed large amounts of salt to people experimentally, have still been able to identify effects of high salt intake by comparing groups of humans who already differ greatly in their salt intake.

In particular, epidemiology, the science of drawing inferences about human diseases by comparing groups of people (often by retrospective historical studies), has for a long time successfully employed formalized procedures for dealing with problems similar to those facing historians of human societies.

Not that new data aren't welcome, you understand, but comparing new and old would yield more.

A whole little academic community specialized in comparing the imagined worlds of Middle English science fiction with the way things had actually happened.

For another, you'll see one of your people comparing us to—I don't know whether they're specimens or records of my kind back when we were savages.

I have taken some pains in consulting and comparing modern travellers, with regard to the fate of those eleven cities of Asia.

We should disgrace the virtues of the Antonines by comparing them with the vices of Hercules or Jupiter.

By comparing these authors, it should seem that Maximin had the particular command of the Tribellian horse, with the general commission of disciplining the recruits of the whole army.

It was probably some ingenious fancy, of comparing the thirty tyrants of Rome with the thirty tyrants of Athens, that induced the writers of the Augustan History to select that celebrated number, which has been gradually received into a popular appellation.