Word.ws English Dictionary

premature optimisation

premature optimisation is the alternative form of premature optimization.

Meaning of premature optimization

Noun

premature optimization (countable and uncountable, plural premature optimizations)

  1. The act of wasting resources on optimising source code that does not represent a significant bottleneck.
    • The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.1973, Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming

Forms of premature optimisation

pluralpremature optimisations

Questions about premature optimisation

What is premature optimisation the alternative form of?
Premature optimisation is the alternative form of premature optimization.

Words near premature optimisation in the dictionary

  1. premature births
  2. premature ejaculation
  3. premature ejaculations
  4. premature ejaculator
  5. premature ejaculators
  6. premature optimisation
  7. premature optimisations
  8. premature optimization
  9. premature optimizations
  10. prematurely
  11. prematureness

Source and license

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