High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The sampling rate, sample rate, or sampling frequency defines the number of samples per second (or per other unit) taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. For time-domain signals, the unit for sampling rate is 1/s. The inverse of the sampling frequency is the sampling period or sampling interval, which is the time between samples.The concept of sampling frequency can only be applied to samplers in which samples are taken periodically. Some samplers may sample at a non-periodic rate.