eclectic

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. adj. Selecting or employing individual elements from a variety of sources, systems, or styles: an eclectic taste in music; an eclectic approach to managing the economy.
2. adj. Made up of or combining elements from a variety of sources: "a popular bar patronized by an eclectic collection of artists, writers, secretaries and aging soldiers on reserve duty” ( Curtis Wilkie).
3. n. One that follows an eclectic method.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. Selecting; choosing; not confined to or following any one model or system, but selecting and appropriating whatever is considered best in all.
2. A practitioner of the American school of eclectic medicine.
3. n. One who, in whatever department of knowledge, not being convinced of the fundamental principles of any existing system, culls from the teachings of different schools such doctrines as seem to him probably true, conformable to good sense, wholesome in practice, or recommended by other secondary considerations; one who holds that opposing schools are right in their distinctive doctrines, wrong only in their opposition to one another. In philosophy the chief groups of eclectics have been— those ancient writers, from the first century before Christ, who, like Cicero, influenced by Platonic skepticism, held a composite doctrine of ethics, logic, etc., aggregated of Platonist, Peripatetic, Stoic, and even Epicurean elements; writers in the seventeenth century who, like Leibnitz, mingled Aristotelian and Cartesian principles; writers in the eighteenth century who adopted in part the views of Leibnitz, in part those of Locke; Schelling and others, who held beliefs derived from various idealistic, pantheistic, and mystical philosophers; the school of Cousin, who took a mean position between a philosophy of experience and one of absolute reason.
4. n. Specifically— A follower of the ancient eclectic philosophy.
5. n. In the early church, a Christian who believed the doctrine of Plato to be conformable to the spirit of the gospel.
6. n. In medicine, a practitioner of eclectic medicine, either ancient or modern; an eclectic physician.

Wiktionary

1. adj. Selecting a mixture of what appears to be best of various doctrines, methods or styles.
2. adj. Unrelated and unspecialized; heterogeneous.
3. n. Someone who selects according to the eclectic method.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. Selecting; choosing (what is true or excellent in doctrines, opinions, etc.) from various sources or systems.
2. adj. Consisting, or made up, of what is chosen or selected
3. n. One who follows an eclectic method.

WordNet 3.0

1. adj. selecting what seems best of various styles or ideas
2. n. someone who selects according to the eclectic method