individual vs specific

individual

adj
  • Relating to a single person or thing as opposed to more than one. 

  • Intended for a single person as opposed to more than one person. 

  • Not divisible without losing its identity. 

noun
  • An object, be it a thing or an agent, as contrasted to a class. 

  • A person considered alone, rather than as belonging to a group of people. 

  • An element belonging to a population. 

  • A single physical human being as a legal subject, as opposed to a legal person such as a corporation. 

specific

adj
  • special, distinctive or unique. 

  • of a value divided by mass (e.g. specific orbital energy) 

  • similarly referring to a value divided by any measure which acts to standardize it (e.g. thrust specific fuel consumption, referring to fuel consumption divided by thrust) 

  • Serving to identify a particular thing (often a disease or condition), with little risk of mistaking something else for it. 

  • Hyponyms: monospecific, multispecific, oligospecific, paucispecific 

  • intended for, or applying to, a particular thing. 

  • limited to a particular antibody or antigen. 

  • a measure compared with a standard reference value by division, to produce a ratio without unit or dimension (e.g. specific refractive index is a pure number, and is relative to that of air) 

  • pertaining to a species, as a taxon or taxa at the rank of species. 

  • being a remedy for a particular disease on a deeper level, rather than just masking the symptoms 

  • explicit or definite. 

noun
  • The details; particulars. 

  • A remedy for a specific disease or condition. 

  • Specification 

  • A distinguishing attribute or quality. 

How often have the words individual and specific occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )