The purpose of this study is to present a guideline to design a short-term manual measurement of environmental noise level, which is more economical and flexible, but less representative than long-term automatic measurement. The proposed guideline can provide the number of measurement times and the length of measurement term required to secure the extent of the representativeness. The data was collected at 4 sites located in Seoul and at 4 sites located outside of Seoul. The probabilities for five-minute equivalent noise levels, Leq, 5min, to stay in an error range from the quarterly representative noise level were used to evaluate sampling techniques. The probability analysis of the daytime period showed that the noise levels measured between 10 am and 2 pm and between 9 pm and 10 pm have the probabilities higher than 60 %. On the other hand, even for the same length of total measurement time, increasing the number of random samplings results in higher probabilities than increasing the length of measurement term.