Word.ws English Dictionary

fail over

fail over verb: to automatically switch processing from a failed component in a critical system to its live spare or backup component.

Verb

fail over (third-person singular simple present fails over, present participle failing over, simple past and past participle failed over)

  1. To automatically switch processing from a failed component in a critical system to its live spare or backup component.
    • If the Web server crashes, we can fail over to the spare in less than a second.

Forms of fail over

third-person singular presentfails over
present participlefailing over
past participlefailed over
pastfailed over

Questions about fail over

What does fail over mean?
Fail over means to automatically switch processing from a failed component in a critical system to its live spare or backup component.
What part of speech is fail over?
Fail over is a verb.
What is the past tense of fail over?
The past tense of fail over is failed over.

Words near fail over in the dictionary

  1. fail dykes
  2. fail fast
  3. fail of
  4. fail open
  5. fail out
  6. fail over
  7. fail safe
  8. fail up
  9. fail up the ladder
  10. fail upward
  11. fail upwards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fail over (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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Cite this entry: “fail over.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fail_over. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.