A surrogate is a substitute or deputy for another person in a specific role and may refer to:

Relationships

Surrogacy Surrogacy is an arrangement, often supported by a legal agreement, whereby a woman agrees to delivery/labour for another person or people, who will become the child's parent(s) after birth. People may seek a surrogacy arrangement when pregnan ...

, an arrangement where a woman agrees to carry and give birth to a child for another person who will become its parent at birth * Sexual surrogate, in sexual therapy *

Surrogate marriage A surrogate marriage describes the arrangement where a woman is infertile or dies young and her family substitutes another woman to bear children for the husband. Cultural roots Surrogate marriages exist in some African cultures, such as the Zulu ...

, a custom in Zulu culture

Economics

Ersatz An ersatz good () is a substitute good, especially one that is considered inferior to the good it replaces. It has particular connotations of wartime usage. Etymology ''Ersatz'' is a German word literally meaning ''substitute'' or ''replacement' ...

, an artificial replacement differing in kind from and inferior in quality to what it replaces. *

Surrogation Surrogation is a psychological phenomenon found in business practices whereby a measure of a construct of interest evolves to replace that construct. Research on performance measurement in management accounting identifies surrogation with "the te ...

, a psychological phenomenon in

management science Management science (or managerial science) is a wide and interdisciplinary study of solving complex problems and making strategic decisions as it pertains to institutions, corporations, governments and other types of organizational entities. It is ...

Arts

* Author surrogate or audience surrogate, reciprocal literary techniques * The Surrogates, a comic book series * ''Surrogates'' (film), a 2009 film based on the comic book series * ''The Surrogate'' (1984 film), a Canadian erotic film starring Art Hindle * ''The Surrogate'' (1995 film), a TV movie starring Alyssa Milano * ''The Surrogate'' (2020 film), an American LGBT-related Independent drama film *''The Surrogate'', original title of '' The Sessions'', a 2012 film starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, and William H. Macy * " Surro-Gate", an episode of the cartoon series ''American Dad!'' * "The Surrogate" (The Outer Limits), an episode of the 1990s version of ''The Outer Limits'' series * ''Surrogate Paintings'', a series by American artist Allan McCollum

Science and technology

Surrogate model A surrogate model is an engineering method used when an outcome of interest cannot be easily measured or computed, so a model of the outcome is used instead. Most engineering design problems require experiments and/or simulations to evaluate design ...

, used in engineering design *

Surrogate endpoint In clinical trials, a surrogate endpoint (or surrogate marker) is a measure of effect of a specific treatment that may correlate with a ''real'' clinical endpoint but does not necessarily have a guaranteed relationship. The National Institutes of ...

, a measure of effect in clinical trials *

Surrogate key A surrogate key (or synthetic key, pseudokey, entity identifier, factless key, or technical key) in a database is a unique identifier for either an ''entity'' in the modeled world or an ''object'' in the database. The surrogate key is ''not'' deri ...

, a unique database identification key *

Surrogate proxy In computer networks, a reverse proxy is the application that sits in front of back-end applications and forwards client (e.g. browser) requests to those applications. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience and securi ...

, a type of server network setup *

Surrogate mechanism The Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/ WG 2 jointly collaborate on the list of the characters in the Universal Coded Character Set. The Universal Coded Character Set, most commonly called the Universal Character Set ( UCS, offic ...

, which allows UTF-16 to represent Unicode code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane as a pair of surrogate code points * Surrogate data testing, a technique for identifying possible nonlinearity in data. * Surrogate, used in library science. Metadata is created to represent information resources. The metadata serves as the surrogate for stored information resources. * Surrogate species, used in ecology and conservation biology to indicate the following: **

Flagship species In conservation biology, a flagship species is a species chosen to raise support for biodiversity conservation in a given place or social context. Definitions have varied, but they have tended to focus on the strategic goals and the socio-economi ...

, chosen to support the marketing of a conservation effort **

Indicator species A bioindicator is any species (an indicator species) or group of species whose function, population, or status can reveal the qualitative status of the environment. The most common indicator species are animals. For example, copepods and other sma ...

, which reveals the qualitative status of the environment **

Keystone species A keystone species is a species which has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance, a concept introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in maintaini ...

, which has a large effect on its environment **

Sentinel species Sentinel species are organisms, often animals, used to detect risks to humans by providing advance warning of a danger. The terms primarily apply in the context of environmental hazards rather than those from other sources. Some animals can act ...

, used to detect risks to humans by providing advance warning of a danger **

Umbrella species Umbrella species are species selected for making conservation-related decisions, typically because protecting these species indirectly protects the many other species that make up the ecological community of its habitat (the umbrella effect). Speci ...

, whose protection indirectly protects many other species sharing its habitat

Other uses

* Campaign surrogate, a politician or person of influence campaigning for a presidential candidate * Surrogate (clergy), a deputy of a bishop or ecclesiastical judge *

Surrogate Court A probate court (sometimes called a surrogate court) is a court that has competence in a jurisdiction to deal with matters of probate and the administration of estates. In some jurisdictions, such courts may be referred to as Orphans' Courts o ...

, a court primarily concerned with the distribution of assets of a decedent * Surrogate alcohol, a substance containing alcohol that is consumed, though it is not meant for human consumption {{Disambiguation