If-then

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A proposition or statement about what should or does occur when a certain condition is met.

    "Disposition statements are always tantamount to conditional if-thens. (“Glass is fragile” amounts to “If glass is subjected to a shock, it will break”; “Wood is combustible” comes to “If wood is exposed to fire, it will burn”; and so on.)"

  2. 2
    A conditional statement; a line of code that specifies a Boolean condition to check and a statement to execute when that Boolean evaluates to true.

    "List Formatter makes properly-spaced & indented listings with page breaks; each statement on new line, if-thens and loops called out; a great de-bugger!"

Example

More examples

"Disposition statements are always tantamount to conditional if-thens. (“Glass is fragile” amounts to “If glass is subjected to a shock, it will break”; “Wood is combustible” comes to “If wood is exposed to fire, it will burn”; and so on.)"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.