Word.ws English Dictionary

contravariances

contravariances is the plural of contravariance.

Meaning of contravariance

Noun

contravariance (countable and uncountable, plural contravariances)

  1. (object-oriented programming) The reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator.
    • I get why with covariance I can return a Dog (a Dog is a Mammal), but why does contravariance work the other way? Shouldn't it accept a derived type when it expects a base type? Contravariance is consistent with Postel's Law: […]2005, Jesse Liberty, Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 47
  2. A functor which reverses composition.
  3. Of vectors, the property of scaling inversely with a change of basis, as opposed to covariance.

Questions about contravariances

What is contravariances the plural of?
Contravariances is the plural of contravariance.

Words near contravariances in the dictionary

  1. contratenors
  2. contraterrene
  3. contravallation
  4. contravallations
  5. contravariance
  6. contravariances
  7. contravariant
  8. contravariant functor
  9. contravariant functors
  10. contravariantly
  11. contravariants

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: contravariances (page history and authors); contravariance (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.

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