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

Relationships

Surrogacy Surrogacy is an arrangement whereby a woman gets pregnant and gives birth on behalf of another person or couple who will become the child's legal parents after birth. People pursue surrogacy for a variety of reasons such as infertility, danger ...

, an arrangement where a woman agrees to carry and give birth to a child for another person who will become its parent at birth * Surrogate partner therapist, in sexual therapy * Surrogate marriage, 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 meaning ''substitute'' or ''replacement''. Altho ...

, an artificial replacement differing in kind from and inferior in quality to what it replaces. * Surrogation, 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 As a literary technique, an author surrogate (also called an author avatar) is a fictional character based on the author. The author surrogate may be disguised, with a different name, or the author surrogate may be quite close to the author, with ...

audience surrogate A narrative technique (also, in fiction, a fictional device) is any of several storytelling methods the creator of a story uses, thus effectively relaying information to the audience or making the story more complete, complex, or engaging. Some ...

, reciprocal literary techniques *''

The Surrogates ''The Surrogates'' is a five-issue comic book Limited series (comics), limited series written by Robert Venditti, drawn by Brett Weldele, and published by Top Shelf Productions from 2005 to 2006. In 2009 it was followed by a prequel graphic novel ...

'', 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 Allan McCollum (born 4 August 1944) is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City the same year. In the late 1970s, he became especial ...

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 an approximate mathematical model of the outcome is used instead. Most engineering design problems require experiments and/or simu ...

, used in engineering design *

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

, 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 or surrogate server is a proxy server that appears to any client to be an ordinary web server, but in reality merely acts as an intermediary that forwards the client's requests to one or more ordinary web se ...

, 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, official ...

, which allows UTF-16 to represent Unicode code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane as a pair of surrogate code points *

Surrogate data testing Surrogate data testing (or the ''method of surrogate data'') is a statistical proof by contradiction technique similar to permutation tests and parametric bootstrapping. It is used to detect non-linearity in a time series. The technique involves ...

, a technique for identifying possible nonlinearity in data. * Surrogate, used in library science.

Metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

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 that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance. The concept was introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in main ...

, 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 ac ...

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

Umbrella species Umbrella species are species selected for making wildlife conservation, conservation-related decisions, typically because protecting these species indirectly protects the many other species that make up the ecological community (ecology), communit ...

, whose protection indirectly protects many other species sharing its habitat

Other uses

Surrogate (clergy) A Surrogate (from Lat. ''surrogare'', to substitute for), is the deputy of a bishop or an ecclesiastical judge, acting in the absence of his principal and strictly bound by the authority of the latter. It is particularly common as a term for cler ...

, 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 Surrogate alcohol is a term for any substance containing ethanol, or other alcohols, that is intentionally consumed by humans but is not meant for human consumption. Some definitions of the term also extend to illegally produced alcoholic beverag ...

, a substance containing alcohol that is consumed, though it is not meant for human consumption {{Disambiguation