instance

noun

1. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Urgency of manner or words; an urgent request; insistence.

   “I know one very well alied, to whom, at the instance of a brother of his[…], I spake to that purpose[…].”

   “[…]undertook at her instance to restore them.”

   “It was settled, as long ago as the first Congress, at the instance of Madison, then in the Senate, and by the deciding vote of John Adams, then Vice-President, that even where the advice and consent of the Senate was necessary to the appointment of an officer, the President had the absolute power to remove him without consulting the Senate.”

2. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)A token; a sign; a symptom or indication.

   “It sends some precious instance of itself/ After the thing it loves.”

3. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)That which is urgent; motive.

   “The instances that second marriage move Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.”

4. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)A piece of evidence; a proof or sign (of something).

   “The reason that I gather he is mad, Besides this present instance of his rage, Is a mad tale he told to day at dinner […]”

5. (countable, uncountable)An occasion; an order of occurrence.

   “The Statutes, or Acts of Parliament themſelves. Theſe ſeem, as if in the Time of Edw[ard] I. they were drawn up into the Form of a Law in the firſt Inſtance, and ſo aſſented to by both Houſes, and the King, as may appear by the very Obſervation of the Contexture and Fabrick of the Statutes of thoſe Times.”

6. (countable, uncountable)A case offered as an exemplification or a precedent; an illustrative example.

   “August 30, 1706, Francis Atterbury, a sermon preach'd in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, at the funeral of Mr. Tho. Bennet most remarkable instances of suffering”

   “sometimes we love those that are absent, saith Philostratus, and gives instance in his friend Athenodorus, that loved a maid at Corinth whom he never saw […]”

7. (countable, uncountable)One of a series of recurring occasions, cases, essentially the same.

   “One's own death is an 'accidental' event, simply another instance of the general rule that human beings die.”

   “If you choose to drink again the best way to avoid another instance of withdrawal is to avoid drinking two days in a row.”

   “The organisations claim fraudsters are targeting properties belonging to both individuals and companies, in some instances using forged documents.”

8. (countable, uncountable)A specific occurrence of something that is created or instantiated, such as a database, or an object of a class in object-oriented programming.

   “Some compilers will allow statics to be inlined, but then incorrectly create multiple instances of the inlined variable at run-time.”

9. (countable, uncountable)A dungeon or other area that is duplicated for each player, or each party of players, that enters it, so that each player or party has a private copy of the area, isolated from other players.

   “As long as the most difficult instance you've tried is Gnomeregan, you're never going to be credible talking about 'difficult encounters'.”

   “For example, when a team of five players enters the Sunken Temple instance in World of Warcraft, they will battle many monsters, but they will not encounter other players even though several teams of players may be experiencing the Sunken Temple at the same time.”

   “Beating a difficult instance becomes second nature after running through it…a few times, with good leaders knowing exactly what to do and how to co-ordinate member actions.”

10. (countable, uncountable)An individual copy of such a dungeon or other area.

    “The instance is created for the group that enters it.”

    “As soon as the first player enters (spawns) a new instance, it appears that the loottable is somehow chosen.”

    “A castle on the eastern edge of the island spawns a new instance whenever a party of players enters.”

11. (Internet, countable, uncountable)An independent server on a decentralised social network, such as Mastodon.

    “To collect the messages, we select the mstdn.jp as the target instance. The mstdn.jp is one of the major Mastodon instances that has 123,331 users and connects to the 2415 other instances at 26 Feb 2017.”

    “In a poll I conducted on Mastodon, 42% of the 674 respondents said that they had reported something, whether it had been a spam account or hateful content, to their instance's moderator.”

    “Every Mastodon instance (neighborhood) has a code of conduct that you have to agree to before you join (move in).”

verb

1. (transitive)To mention as a case or example; to refer to; to cite

   “The reason why so many fallacious opinions have passed into proverbs is owing to that carelessness which makes the individual instance the general rule.”

   “Mr. BENSON estimated the amount of guano on Jarvis' Island at 5,000,000 tons, and on Baker's Island at no less. He instanced experiments to show that it was in no way inferior to the best Peruvian article. Another company had lately been formed to bring guano from still other islands lately discovered.”

   “District Veterinary Surgeon Hutchinson's report from Newcastle is again worthy of notice, as instancing the difficulty of suppression of contagious disease under the disturbed conditions now existing in the northern part of the Colony.”

   “The poems which I have instanced are concrete and relatively glaring examples of the intangible difference which the change of language made in Rilke's visions .”

2. (intransitive)To cite an example as proof; to exemplify.
3. To duplicate (a dungeon or other area) for each player, or each party of players, that enters it, so that each player or party has a private copy of the area, isolated from other players.

   “In these games, such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, most significant PvP happens inside instanced or player-capped areas.”

   “This is an improvement compared to contemporary MMORPG which combine zoning and instancing, whereas replication is currently not available for a combination with either of them. Zoning (Cai, Xavier, Turner, & Lee, 2002; Macedonia, Zyda,[…]”

   “Instanced encounters standard in today's MMORPGs, but the lack of instancing in early EverQuest meant that the guild (a team of players operating as a team) or group(s) of players who raced to and engaged a target first could claim the[…]”

4. (transitive)To render (an object) as part of a batch, using the same geometry data.