Word.ws English Dictionary

path dependence

path dependence noun: a situation in which the outcome varies with the route taken.

Noun

path dependence (usually uncountable, plural path dependences)

  1. (countable, usually) A situation in which the outcome varies with the route taken.
  2. (usually) The theory that a technological option selected by the market need not be the technologically best one, because of the traction obtained by an early-introduced, technologically inferior alternative option.

Forms of path dependence

pluralpath dependences
alternative formpath dependency

Questions about path dependence

What does path dependence mean?
Path dependence means a situation in which the outcome varies with the route taken.
What part of speech is path dependence?
Path dependence is a noun.
What is the plural of path dependence?
The plural of path dependence is path dependences.

Words near path dependence in the dictionary

  1. patesis
  2. Patey
  3. path
  4. path cascade
  5. path cascades
  6. path dependence
  7. path dependences
  8. path dependencies
  9. path dependency
  10. path integral formalism
  11. path length

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: path dependence (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: “path dependence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/path_dependence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.