Word.ws English Dictionary

positive-sum

positive-sum adjective: pertaining to a game or situation where overall benefits to all participants can increase.

Adjective

positive-sum (not comparable)

  1. Pertaining to a game or situation where overall benefits to all participants can increase.
    • Morality […] is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.2011, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, published 2012, page 220
    • The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. When a wide enough circle of people confer on how best to treat each other, the conversation is bound to go in certain directions. If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob...2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN
    Antonyms:
    negative-sum

Antonyms of positive-sum

Questions about positive-sum

What does positive-sum mean?
Positive-sum means pertaining to a game or situation where overall benefits to all participants can increase.
What part of speech is positive-sum?
Positive-sum is an adjective.

Words near positive-sum in the dictionary

  1. positive zero
  2. positive zeroes
  3. positive zeros
  4. positive-definite
  5. positive-edge-triggered
  6. positive-sum
  7. positively
  8. positiveness
  9. positivenesses
  10. positiver
  11. positives

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: positive-sum (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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