means The act of choosing one or more things from a larger set, or the group of things so chosen.

from From Latin 'selectio,' a noun built from 'seligere' — to pick out, gather apart — which fuses 'se-' (apart, aside) with 'legere' (to gather, choose, read). That same 'legere' seeds a whole family: 'collect,' 'elect,' 'legend,' even 'lecture.' English took the word in the early 17th century, but it gained its sharpest edge in the 19th, when Darwin paired it with 'natural' and turned a tidy act of choosing into the slow, merciless winnowing of life itself.