Word.ws English Dictionary

Little's law

Little's law noun: a theorem which states that the long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the average time W that a customer spends in the system.

Noun

Little's law

  1. (queueing theory) A theorem which states that the long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the average time W that a customer spends in the system.
    • What about determining how large our queue needs to be to handle a desired number of requests. Can Little's Law help us answer that?2017, Katherine Cox-Buday, Concurrency in Go […] , O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 130

Origin of Little's law

The theorem was proposed by American researcher John Little (1928–2024).

Questions about Little's law

What does Little's law mean?
Little's law means a theorem which states that the long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the average time W that a customer spends in the system.
What part of speech is Little's law?
Little's law is a noun.

Words near Little's law in the dictionary

  1. Little Wratting
  2. Little Yeldham
  3. Little York
  4. little yus
  5. Little's disease
  6. Little's law
  7. little-ease
  8. little-eases
  9. little-endian
  10. little-finger nail
  11. little-finger nails

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Little's law (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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