Word.ws English Dictionary

dead code

dead code noun: instructions that, when executed, have no effect on the running of the program.

Noun

dead code (uncountable)

  1. Instructions that, when executed, have no effect on the running of the program.
    • Much dead code elimination is actually done on intermediate representations of your code, which may contain unnecessary intermediate calculations[…]2006, William Von Hagen, The definitive guide to GCC
  2. A portion of source code that will never be executed as part of the running program.
    • Many software projects contain much dead code in the form of deprecated functions.
    • If the test data is exhaustive you can even locate dead code: program code that is never executed.2003, Diomidis Spinellis, Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, Addison-Wesley Professional, →ISBN, page 372

Synonyms of dead code

Questions about dead code

What does dead code mean?
Dead code means instructions that, when executed, have no effect on the running of the program.
What part of speech is dead code?
Dead code is a noun.

Words near dead code in the dictionary

  1. dead cert
  2. dead certs
  3. Dead Chest Island
  4. dead click
  5. dead clicks
  6. dead code
  7. dead coloring
  8. dead colouring
  9. dead comet
  10. dead comets
  11. dead donkey

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead code (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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