Word.ws English Dictionary

bikeshedding

bikeshedding noun: futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues. Also the present participle and gerund of bikeshed.

Noun

bikeshedding (uncountable)

  1. Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
    • Exactly. Bikeshedding the millions of possible reasons the queue/ratelimit was triggered is silly.2000 December 14, Bill Fumerola, “Re: Ratelimint Enhancement patch (Please Review One Last Time!)”, in mailing.freebsd.net (Usenet), retrieved 20 Jun 2020, message-ID...
    • Modulo giving developers and the user community a few weeks to comment on the matter and make any last convincing cases for keeping it, I agree. That's not to say that I want to see two weeks worth of i386 bike-shedding and highly emotional arguments for keeping it purely on general principle, I'm...2001 January 15, Jordan Hubbard, “Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/conf GENERIC”, in mailing.freebsd.cvs (Usenet), retrieved 20 Jun 2020, message-ID <93t363$273m$1@FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.edu.tw>
  2. Procrastination.

Also used as

bikeshedding is also the present participle and gerund of bikeshed.

Forms of bikeshedding

alternative formbike-shedding

Origin of bikeshedding

From bikeshed + -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp and has spread from there to the software industry at large.

Questions about bikeshedding

What does bikeshedding mean?
Bikeshedding means futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
What part of speech is bikeshedding?
Bikeshedding is a noun.

Words near bikeshedding in the dictionary

  1. bikeshare
  2. bikeshares
  3. bikesharing
  4. bikeshed
  5. bikeshedded
  6. bikeshedding
  7. bikesheds
  8. biketard
  9. biketards
  10. bikewashing
  11. bikeway

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bikeshedding (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-bikeshedding.oga.

Cite this entry: “bikeshedding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bikeshedding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.