Word.ws English Dictionary

failsoft

failsoft adjective: supporting graceful degradation, so that a partial failure does not bring down the entire system.

Adjective

failsoft (not comparable)

  1. (dated) Supporting graceful degradation, so that a partial failure does not bring down the entire system.
    • The second phase of the executive development proceeded through two steps as stated in Section 2. First, a failsoft executive was developed providing automatic failure detection and recovery […]1973, ACM Special Interest Group in Operating Systems, Fourth Symposium on Operating System Principles
    • After automatic self-test, an important follow-on step in improving test set availability is the incorporation of failsoft features in the control software in conjunction with hardware capabilities.1980, Autotestcon '80: 2-5 November 1980, Sheraton Washington, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Origin of failsoft

From fail + soft.

Questions about failsoft

What does failsoft mean?
Failsoft means supporting graceful degradation, so that a partial failure does not bring down the entire system.
What part of speech is failsoft?
Failsoft is an adjective.

Words near failsoft in the dictionary

  1. fails upwards
  2. failsafe
  3. failsafed
  4. failsafes
  5. failsafing
  6. failsoft
  7. failson
  8. failsons
  9. Failsworth
  10. failtastic
  11. failure

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: failsoft (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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