Persistence

noun

noun ·3 syllables ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The property of being persistent. countable, uncountable

    "You've got to admire her persistence. She's asked him out every day for a month even though she keeps turning him down."

  2. 2
    the act of persisting or persevering; continuing or repeating behavior wordnet
  3. 3
    Of data, the property of continuing to exist after the termination of the program. countable, uncountable

    "Once written to a disk file, the data has persistence: it will still be there tomorrow when we run the next program."

  4. 4
    persistent determination wordnet
  5. 5
    Continuation of the previous day's weather (particularly temperature and precipitation statistics). countable, uncountable
Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    the property of a continuous and connected period of time wordnet
  2. 7
    The number of times an operation can be iteratively applied to a number before it reaches a permanently constant state. countable, uncountable

    "The persistence of the number 39 under the operation of multiplying the digits of the number is three, because 3x9 = 27, 2x7 = 14, and 1x4 = 4, and no further iterations will change the number again."

Synonyms

All synonyms
continuitydoggednessperseverancepersistencypersistencyabidingness

Example

More examples

"She was disgusted at his persistence."

Etymology

From Middle French persistance.

Related phrases

lactase persistencepersistence hunterpersistence hunting

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