Word.ws English Dictionary

lo-fi

lo-fi adjective: having an old-fashioned quality, as if recorded with primitive equipment.

Adjective

lo-fi (comparative more lo-fi, superlative most lo-fi)

  1. (sound) Having an old-fashioned quality, as if recorded with primitive equipment.
  2. Having a rough quality, not musically smooth and refined.
    • cute-sounding lo-fi drum beats
  3. Recorded at home with makeshift tools.

Noun

lo-fi (uncountable)

  1. A subgenre of hip-hop that includes traditional jazz elements and drum machine samples.
    • But I feel like the whole “lo-fi beats” thing has become like Starbucks music.2026 February 19, Stevie Chick, quoting Flying Lotus, “Musician and film-maker Flying Lotus: ‘The whole lo-fi beats thing has become like Starbucks music’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN, archived from the...
  2. A subgenre of rock music characterized by minimal production, giving a raw and unsophisticated sound.

Antonyms of lo-fi

Forms of lo-fi

comparativemore lo-fi
superlativemost lo-fi
alternative formlofi
alternative formlow-fi

Origin of lo-fi

Syllabic abbreviation of low fidelity.

Questions about lo-fi

What does lo-fi mean?
Lo-fi means having an old-fashioned quality, as if recorded with primitive equipment.
What part of speech is lo-fi?
Lo-fi can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near lo-fi in the dictionary

  1. lo mein loophole
  2. lo pak
  3. Lo Wu
  4. Lo'd
  5. lo-cal
  6. lo-fi
  7. Lo-ho
  8. lo-lo
  9. Lo-ning
  10. Lo-ok
  11. Lo-p'u

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lo-fi (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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Cite this entry: “lo-fi.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lo-fi. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.