antipattern
antipattern noun: a design pattern that may be commonly used, but is ineffective or counterproductive in practice.
Noun
antipattern (plural antipatterns)
- A design pattern that may be commonly used, but is ineffective or counterproductive in practice.
- If a Design Pattern gives you a general solution to a recurring problem in a particular context, then what does an anti-pattern give you? An Anti-Pattern tells you how to go from a problem to a BAD solution.2004, Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra, Head First Design Patterns, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 612
Forms of antipattern
| plural | antipatterns |
|---|---|
| alternative form | anti-pattern |
Origin of antipattern
From anti- + pattern, coined by Andrew Koenig in 1995.
Questions about antipattern
- What does antipattern mean?
- Antipattern means a design pattern that may be commonly used, but is ineffective or counterproductive in practice.
- What part of speech is antipattern?
- Antipattern is a noun.
- What is the plural of antipattern?
- The plural of antipattern is antipatterns.
Words near antipattern in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: antipattern (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-antipattern.oga.
Cite this entry: “antipattern.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/antipattern. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.