speedup
speedup noun: an amount or rate of decrease in time taken to do a certain amount of work.
Noun
speedup (countable and uncountable, plural speedups)
- An amount or rate of decrease in time taken to do a certain amount of work.
- The results of this generalized speedup of the corporate metabolism are multiple: shorter product life cycles, more leasing and renting, more frequent buying and selling, more ephemeral consumption patterns, […]1980, Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, page 230
- Antonyms:
- slowdown
- The relationship between time taken and number of processors used.
- An employer's demand for more output without more pay.
- There were, of course, those observers who argued that since in some industries 50 or 60 per cent of those employed were scientific, technical, and administrative staff, the employer would soon include them in his speedup plans.1975 March 20, New Scientist, volume 65, number 941, page 711
- For the mass of new workers who had not come out of a syndicalist or craft tradition, incentive pay and the speedup idea carried relatively little negative meaning.1987, Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II, page 145
- Synonyms:
- stretch-out
- Antonyms:
- go-slow, slowdown, work-to-rule
Examples of speedup in a sentence
- The strike was over a speedup of the assembly line, which in the previous week had increased from 49 to 58 cars per hour.1997, Vincent Harding, Robin D. G. Kelley, Earl Lewis, We Changed the World: African Americans 1945-1970, page 171:
- With constant speedup of the line and with the cold temperatures of the plant, one angry worker told me, “After ten years, people walk like they're sixty or seventy."2007, Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of, page 54:
Synonyms of speedup
Antonyms
Forms of speedup
| plural | speedups |
|---|---|
| alternative form | speed-up |
Origin of speedup
Deverbal from speed up.
Words formed from speedup
Questions about speedup
- What does speedup mean?
- Speedup means an amount or rate of decrease in time taken to do a certain amount of work.
- How do you use speedup in a sentence?
- The strike was over a speedup of the assembly line, which in the previous week had increased from 49 to 58 cars per hour.
- What part of speech is speedup?
- Speedup is a noun.
- What is the plural of speedup?
- The plural of speedup is speedups.
Words near speedup in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: speedup (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: “speedup.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/speedup. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.