Word.ws English Dictionary

false negatives

false negatives is the plural of false negative.

Meaning of false negative

Noun

false negative (plural false negatives)

  1. A result of a test that shows as absent something that is present.
    • While a false positive from a cancer screening test will unnecessarily frighten a healthy person, a false negative will deprive them of timely treatment.
  2. A type II error (“accepting the null hypothesis when it is false”).
    • Statisticians sometimes refer to false negative results as Type II errors. Type II errors cannot be controlled explicitly, but are controlled implicitly via the experimental design.2003, Dov Stekel, “Experimental Design”, in Microarray Bioinformatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 222
    Synonyms:
    FN

Questions about false negatives

What is false negatives the plural of?
False negatives is the plural of false negative.

Words near false negatives in the dictionary

  1. false morel
  2. false morels
  3. false move
  4. false moves
  5. false negative
  6. false negatives
  7. false nine
  8. false nines
  9. false northing
  10. false northings
  11. false note

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: false negatives (page history and authors); false negative (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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