Word.ws English Dictionary

corner case

corner case noun: a problem or situation that occurs only when two or more operating parameters are at extreme values, or when two or more unusual operating circumstances happen to coincide.

Noun

corner case (plural corner cases)

  1. A problem or situation that occurs only when two or more operating parameters are at extreme values, or when two or more unusual operating circumstances happen to coincide.
    • The smallest and largest legal packet sizes are examples of the first type of corner case. This type of boundary condition is usually specified by or easily inferred from the externally published feature set of the design.2001, Faisal I. Haque, Khizar A. Khan, Jonathan Erik Michelson, The Art of Verification with Vera, Verification Central LLC
    • Using assumptions, however, our goal is to prove correctness while finding complex corner-case bugs.2006, Harry D. Foster, Adam C. Krolnik, David J. Lacey, Assertion-Based Design, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 58
  2. (broadly) Any unusual scenario.
    • However, there is a corner case during which we don't want to trigger this event, and that is when the widget is being instantiated for the first time.2013, Adam Boduch, jQuery UI Cookbook, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN
    • Furthermore, Robolectric doesn't test activities against real devices or emulators and this might not catch corner case or incompatibilities or issues with particular versions and devices.2015, Patroklos Papapetrou, Jonathan LALOU, Android Application Development with Maven, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 76

Forms of corner case

pluralcorner cases

Questions about corner case

What does corner case mean?
Corner case means a problem or situation that occurs only when two or more operating parameters are at extreme values, or when two or more unusual operating circumstances happen to coincide.
What part of speech is corner case?
Corner case is a noun.
What is the plural of corner case?
The plural of corner case is corner cases.

Words near corner case in the dictionary

  1. corner boy
  2. corner boys
  3. corner bracket
  4. corner brackets
  5. Corner Brook
  6. corner case
  7. corner cases
  8. corner flag
  9. corner flags
  10. corner forward
  11. corner forwards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: corner case (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:

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