Word.ws English Dictionary

optionals

optionals is the plural of optional.

Meaning of optional

Noun

optional (plural optionals)

  1. Something that is not compulsory, especially part of an academic course.
  2. (capitalized, sometimes) In various programming languages, a kind of variable that is assigned a specific data type but may or may not hold an actual value.
    • In functional languages, there is a data type called the option type, also called the maybe type. Its purpose is to encapsulate a value, which is returned from a function. […] In Java 8, the Optional class has been added to serve as an option type.2015, Richard M Reese, Learning Java Functional Programming, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 147

See all 3 meanings of optional

Questions about optionals

What is optionals the plural of?
Optionals is the plural of optional.

Words near optionals in the dictionary

  1. optionalizes
  2. optionalizing
  3. optionally
  4. optionally piloted vehicle
  5. optionally piloted vehicles
  6. optionals
  7. optionary
  8. optioned
  9. optionee
  10. optioneering
  11. optionees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: optionals (page history and authors); optional (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: “optionals.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/optionals. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.