Initialization

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The process of preparing something to begin. British, English, Oxford, US, uncountable
  2. 2
    (computer science) the format of sectors on the surface of a hard disk drive so that the operating system can access them and setting a starting position wordnet
  3. 3
    An act of preparing something to begin. British, English, Oxford, US, countable
  4. 4
    An assignment of an initial value for a data object or variable British, English, Oxford, US, countable, uncountable

Synonyms

All synonyms
initialisationlow level formattinglow-level formatting

Example

More examples

"The story doesn’t end here, however. To register itself with the application, a valid plugin is expected to have an initialization function which the application will call."

Etymology

From initialize + -ation.

Related phrases

lazy initializationlazy initialisation

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