Word.ws English Dictionary

i/o

i/o adjective: in/out, input/output (descriptive of data flow). Also the initialism of instead of.

Adjective

i/o (not comparable)

  1. (also nominalised) in/out, input/output (descriptive of data flow)
    • i/o devices are pieces of hardware used to communicate with a computer.

Noun capitalized: I/O

I/O (usually uncountable, plural I/Os)

  1. (abbreviation, usually) Abbreviation of input/output.
    • In addition to the synchronous blocking I/O explored in the last two chapters, NIO also supports nonblocking I/O.2006, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Java I/O
    • This feels about right, as does the idea that half a second will be taken up just doing disk I/O related to your page.
    • The final thrust of Bob's argument is that if you strip away all disk I/O (and he cites the move to SSD persistent storage), we'll shift away from interpreted languages such as Ruby and PHP and back to Java.2011 October 17, Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, “Java's second coming? Over my cold, dead RAM-cached database”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 27 Jun 2022

Also used as

i/o is also the initialism of instead of.

Forms of i/o

Adjective
alternative formI/O
alternative formIO
Noun
pluralI/Os
alternative formi/o

Phrases with i/o

Questions about i/o

What does i/o mean?
I/o means in/out, input/output (descriptive of data flow).
What part of speech is i/o?
I/o can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near i/o in the dictionary

  1. i.p.i.
  2. i.q.
  3. i.v.
  4. I.W.
  5. I/DD
  6. i/o
  7. I/O bound
  8. I/Os
  9. i18n
  10. I2
  11. I3

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: i/o (page history and authors); I/O (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: “i/o.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/i%2Fo. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.