Two balls of radius 2 in the Cayley graph of the dihedral group. Both balls contain 7 of the 8 group elements and are isomorphic as edge-colored graphs. Furthermore, for any radius and , we can use the approximating graph as the full Cayley graph itself, where the set of all vertices satisfies . Since all 8 vertices have isomorphic -balls (by the vertex-transitivity of Cayley graphs), is sofic.
The class of sofic groups is closed under the operations of taking subgroups, extensions by amenable groups, and free products. A finitely generated group is sofic if it is the limit of a sequence of sofic groups. The limit of a sequence of amenable groups (that is, an initially subamenable group) is necessarily sofic, but there exist sofic groups that are not initially subamenable groups.[2]