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derived from or guided by experience or experiment.
depending upon experience or observation alone, without using scientific method or theory, especially as in medicine.
provable or verifiable by experience or experiment.
Contemporary Examples

There’s also a fair amount of empirical support for the theory that lobbying dollars are driving up home prices in the District.
Is DC Real Estate Headed Up or Down? Megan McArdle October 22, 2012

Manzi, who founded a company that makes software expediting RFTs, is an enthusiast of this empirical approach, and rightly so.
David’s Book Club: Uncontrolled Kenneth Silber May 11, 2012

Those are the kinds of things that the IMF, for the first time, is actually studying in details and with empirical data.
Transcript: Thomas Friedman Interviews Hillary Clinton and Christine Lagarde April 4, 2014

The book is less interested in [testing methods] than in the limits of empirical knowledge.
Bring Science to Public Policy David Frum April 24, 2012

There is other empirical work, and some good theoretical reasons, to think that too much debt is dangerous.
Did Reinhart and Rogoff Flub a Major Statistic? Megan McArdle April 16, 2013

Historical Examples

“Science and Health” knows nothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of the medical science of 1860 and 1870.
Modern Religious Cults and Movements Gaius Glenn Atkins

There is after all some justification for Guetta’s criticism of empirical instruction.
The Psychology of Singing David C. Taylor

The mechanical doctrines are used in the attempt to interpret the empirical knowledge.
The Psychology of Singing David C. Taylor

empirical teaching based on the singer’s sensations is of no avail.
The Psychology of Singing David C. Taylor

I would suggest once again that the only real test to which the value of these arguments can be submitted is the empirical test.
Liberalism L. T. Hobhouse

adjective
derived from or relating to experiment and observation rather than theory
(of medical treatment) based on practical experience rather than scientific proof
(philosophy)

(of knowledge) derived from experience rather than by logic from first principles Compare a priori, a posteriori
(of a proposition) subject, at least theoretically, to verification Compare analytic (sense 4), synthetic (sense 4)

of or relating to medical quackery
noun
(statistics) the posterior probability of an event derived on the basis of its observed frequency in a sample Compare mathematical probability See also posterior probability
adj.

1560s, from empiric + -al (1).

empirical em·pir·i·cal (ěm-pēr’ĭ-kəl)
adj.

Relying on or derived from observation or experiment.

Verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment.

Of or being a philosophy of medicine emphasizing practical experience and observation over scientific theory.

em·pir’i·cal·ly adv.
empirical
(ěm-pîr’ĭ-kəl)
Relying on or derived from observation or experiment.