Word.ws English Dictionary

surrogate key

surrogate key noun: a unique identifier for an entity or object, not derived from application data.

Noun

surrogate key (plural surrogate keys)

  1. A unique identifier for an entity or object, not derived from application data.
    • We weren't sure which columns in the table would have unique values, so we used a separate surrogate key as the primary key.

Forms of surrogate key

pluralsurrogate keys

Questions about surrogate key

What does surrogate key mean?
Surrogate key means a unique identifier for an entity or object, not derived from application data.
What part of speech is surrogate key?
Surrogate key is a noun.
What is the plural of surrogate key?
The plural of surrogate key is surrogate keys.

Words near surrogate key in the dictionary

  1. surrogate advertising
  2. surrogate court
  3. surrogate courts
  4. surrogate father
  5. surrogate fathers
  6. surrogate key
  7. surrogate keys
  8. surrogate mother
  9. surrogate mothers
  10. surrogate pair
  11. surrogate pairs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: surrogate key (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: “surrogate key.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/surrogate_key. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.