Word.ws English Dictionary

failover

failover noun: an automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system, such as a means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel backup system which is kept running at all times, so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.

Noun

failover (countable and uncountable, plural failovers)

  1. An automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system, such as a means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel backup system which is kept running at all times, so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.
    • Horizontal scaling gives you some failover and flexibility that you normally cannot get with only vertical scaling.2004, Gregory Nyberg, Robert Patrick, Paul Bauerschmidt, Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and ..., page 638
    • while Tungsten is not heavily redundant as these systems, the ability of Lustre to support some failover can be leveraged to eliminate single points of failure.2005, Proceedings, IEEE Computer Society, page 338

Forms of failover

pluralfailovers

Origin of failover

Deverbal from fail over.

Questions about failover

What does failover mean?
Failover means an automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system, such as a means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel backup system which is kept running at all times, so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.
What part of speech is failover?
Failover is a noun.
What is the plural of failover?
The plural of failover is failovers.

Words near failover in the dictionary

  1. faille
  2. Failler
  3. failles
  4. Failor
  5. Failors
  6. failover
  7. failovers
  8. failproof
  9. fails
  10. fails at life
  11. fails closed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: failover (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-uk-failover.ogg.

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