Word.ws English Dictionary

syntactic salt

syntactic salt noun: a feature of a programming language intended to serve as a guardrail against writing code with an unintended meaning.

Noun

syntactic salt (uncountable)

  1. A feature of a programming language intended to serve as a guardrail against writing code with an unintended meaning.

Origin of syntactic salt

Coined analogously with syntactic sugar.

Questions about syntactic salt

What does syntactic salt mean?
Syntactic salt means a feature of a programming language intended to serve as a guardrail against writing code with an unintended meaning.
What part of speech is syntactic salt?
Syntactic salt is a noun.

Words near syntactic salt in the dictionary

  1. syntaces
  2. syntactic
  3. syntactic expletive
  4. syntactic expletives
  5. syntactic middle voice
  6. syntactic salt
  7. syntactic sugar
  8. syntactical
  9. syntacticality
  10. syntactically
  11. syntactician

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: syntactic salt (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-syntactic salt.wav.

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