Parsimony
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily. uncountable, usually
"Near-synonyms: (usually admirable) frugality, economy, thrift, thriftiness; (excessive degree) tightness, stinginess; (extreme degree) miserliness; see also Thesaurus:frugal, Thesaurus:stingy"
- 2 extreme stinginess wordnet
- 3 The quality or characteristic of using the fewest resources or explanations to solve a problem. broadly, uncountable, usually
"We used three search heuristics, Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and maximum parsimony, to construct phylogenies from unique COI haplotypes and used default parameters for analyses unless otherwise noted."
- 4 extreme care in spending money; reluctance to spend money unnecessarily wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Near-synonyms: (usually admirable) frugality, economy, thrift, thriftiness; (excessive degree) tightness, stinginess; (extreme degree) miserliness; see also Thesaurus:frugal, Thesaurus:stingy"
Etymology
From Middle English parcimonie, from Middle French parsimonie, from Latin parsimōnia (“frugality, sparingness”), from pars-, past participle stem of parcere (“to spare”), + -monia, suffix signifying action, state, or condition.
Related phrases
More for "parsimony"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.