Word.ws English Dictionary

floptical

floptical adjective: using a combination of magnetic and optical technology.

floptical: using a combination of magnetic and optical technology
Image: Frodet, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

floptical (not comparable)

  1. (data storage) Using a combination of magnetic and optical technology.
    • Floptical technology is a practical and affordable way to increase your storage capacity— without giving up the convenience of diskettes.1993 June 21, advertisement, InfoWorld, page 12
    • Optical technology appears in many forms of devices, starting from CD-ROM (Compact Disk Read Only Memory) disks, to floptical disk (optical floppy disks) to very high capacity (up to 20 GB) optical disks.2004, S. Sadagopan, Management Information Systems, page 62

Noun

floptical (plural flopticals)

  1. A floptical disk.
    • Like floppy drives on steroids, flopticals use laser optics to store up to 21MB of data on one 3½-inch disk. The advantages of flopticals are a low buy-in cost ($400 and under) and the convenience of using the drive for your current library of 1.44MB and 720K disks (as well as IBM′s 2.88MB disks).1995, Eric Knorr, The PC Bible, page 74
    • You said you are using flopticals in your sound studio? Is that where you use it mostly?1997, Lee Purcell, David Martin, The Complete Recordable-CD Guide, page 461

Examples of floptical in a sentence

  • Alternatives to tape and CD-R include floptical disks, Bernoulli boxes, and other removable drives.2006, Vicki Stanfield, Roderick W. Smith, Linux System Administration, page 270:
  • Flopticals, once promising, have mostly been shoved aside by improvements in capacity and price for older designs that are still around and new devices, such as the Zip and SuperDisk LS-120 drives.2007, Corey Sandler, chapter 11, in Fix Your Own PC, page 5:

Forms of floptical

Adjective
alternative formFloptical
Noun
pluralflopticals

Origin of floptical

Blend of floppy (“floppy disk, a magnetic data storage device”) + optical.

Phrases with floptical

Questions about floptical

What does floptical mean?
Floptical means using a combination of magnetic and optical technology.
How do you use floptical in a sentence?
Alternatives to tape and CD-R include floptical disks, Bernoulli boxes, and other removable drives.
What part of speech is floptical?
Floptical can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near floptical in the dictionary

  1. flopsweats
  2. flopsy
  3. Flopsyes
  4. Flopsys
  5. floptastic
  6. floptical
  7. floptical disk
  8. floptical disks
  9. flopticals
  10. flopulist
  11. flopulists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: floptical (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:

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