Word.ws English Dictionary

technical debt

technical debt noun: the implied cost of additional future work caused by choosing an easy but inferior solution originally.

Noun

technical debt (countable and uncountable, plural technical debts)

  1. The implied cost of additional future work caused by choosing an easy but inferior solution originally.
    • An important attribute of technical debt is that it grows in an unpredictable, nonlinear fashion. Each bit of technical debt, when added to the pool of existing technical debt, might do significantly more harm than the size of that new debt might imply.2012, Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum, Addison-Wesley, →ISBN, page 142
    Synonyms:
    design debt, code debt

Synonyms of technical debt

  • design debt
  • code debt

Forms of technical debt

pluraltechnical debts
alternative clippingtech debt

Origin of technical debt

Coined by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham in 1992.

Questions about technical debt

What does technical debt mean?
Technical debt means the implied cost of additional future work caused by choosing an easy but inferior solution originally.
What part of speech is technical debt?
Technical debt is a noun.
What is the plural of technical debt?
The plural of technical debt is technical debts.

Words near technical debt in the dictionary

  1. technical areas
  2. technical climbing
  3. technical college
  4. technical colleges
  5. technical cybernetics
  6. technical debt
  7. technical debts
  8. technical difficulties
  9. technical difficulty
  10. technical diving
  11. technical drawing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: technical debt (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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