if-then

if-then noun: a proposition or statement about what should or does occur when a certain condition is met.

Noun

if-then (plural if-thens)

A proposition or statement about what should or does occur when a certain condition is met.
- Disposition statements are always tantamount to conditional if-thens. (“Glass is fragile” amounts to “If glass is subjected to a shock, it will break”; “Wood is combustible” comes to “If wood is exposed to fire, it will burn”; and so on.)2007, Nicholas Rescher, Conditionals, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 13
- Over time, I created a list of some of my own if-thens: If I want to get a lot of original writing done, I go to the library, where I don’t have Internet. If offered wine, I decline.2015, Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits—to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life, Broadway Books, →ISBN
A conditional statement; a line of code that specifies a Boolean condition to check and a statement to execute when that Boolean evaluates to true.
- List Formatter makes properly-spaced & indented listings with page breaks; each statement on new line, if-thens and loops called out; a great de-bugger!1981, Apple Orchard, page 31
- Storing (closed) predicate definitions in this form (if all the predicates are so stored, and there never were any cuts or if-thens in the first place, we have the well-known "completion" of a logic program) makes the coding of source-level tools simpler.1985, 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming: July 15-18, 1985; Sheraton Boston Hotel Boston, Mass., IEEE Computer Society Press, →ISBN, page 71

Examples of if-then in a sentence

Or maybe her if-then was shaped more like a question: Surely God would not have brought this child here if it was not His plan to keep her here, right?2023, Alicia Britt Chole, The Night Is Normal: A Guide Through Spiritual Pain, Tyndale Refresh, →ISBN, page 106:
Many if-thens will degrade vector performance below that of a scalar version that computes only the correct branch.1992, Donald L. DeAngelis, Louis J. Gross, editors, Individual-Based Models and Approaches in Ecology: Populations, Communities and...
Think of this process as programming with pictures, complete with loops, pauses, if-thens, and so on.1994, Compute!, page 30:
Finally, they use descriptions and statements from set theory to provide material for flowcharting problems that contain multiple decisions (nested if-thens).2000, Harold J. Rood, Logic and Structured Design for Computer Programmers, Brooks/Cole, →ISBN, page ix:

Forms of if-then

plural	if-thens
alternative form	if/then
alternative form	if–then

Words formed from if-then

if-thenism

Phrases with if-then

Questions about if-then

What does if-then mean?: If-then means a proposition or statement about what should or does occur when a certain condition is met.
How do you use if-then in a sentence?: Or maybe her if-then was shaped more like a question: Surely God would not have brought this child here if it was not His plan to keep her here, right?
What part of speech is if-then?: If-then is a noun.
What is the plural of if-then?: The plural of if-then is if-thens.

Words near if-then in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: if-then (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: 2026-09-02

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