an established or official way of doing something, followed in a particular order
Before boarding the plane, passengers go through the security procedure at the airport.
The company updated its hiring procedures to make them faster and fairer.
✦ From French “procédure”, from Middle French, ultimately from Latin “procedere” meaning “to go forward, proceed”.
a medical operation or treatment performed on a patient
The dentist said the whole procedure would take less than an hour.
After the knee surgery procedure, Anna had to use crutches for two weeks.
✦ Specialized medical sense of “procedure” emerged in the early 20th century as surgery advanced.
a block of code in a computer program that performs a specific task; subroutine
The programmer wrote a separate procedure to handle user input.
If the sorting procedure is inefficient, the app will feel slow.
✦ Adopted in computer science in the 1950s to describe a self-contained set of instructions within a larger program.
