Word.ws English Dictionary

trinary

trinary is the alternative form of ternary.

Noun

trinary (plural trinaries)

  1. A trinary star.
  2. A ternary, a set of three things.
    • […] a trinary of terms to describe conceived, perceived, and lived space.2007 December 12, James D. Mardock, Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson's City and the Space of the Author, Routledge, →ISBN, page 124
    • Collectively, religion, the secular, the superstition form what Josephson has called a "trinary" of mutually constitutive forces.2019 March 25, Jolyon Baraka Thomas, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 152

Meaning of ternary

Adjective

ternary (not comparable)

  1. Made up of three things.
  2. Arranged in groups of three.
  3. To the base three.
    • Perhaps the prettiest number system of all is the balanced ternary notation1999, Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, 3rd edition, volume 2, →ISBN, page 207
    Synonyms:
    trinary
  4. Having three variables.
  5. Containing, or consisting of, three different parts, as elements, atoms, groups, or radicals, which are regarded as having different functions or relations in the molecule.
    • Sodic hydroxide, NaOH, is a ternary compound.
  6. Of an operator taking three operands.
    • An "if…then…else" construction is called a ternary operator when it is combined in one line of a program.

See all 9 meanings of ternary

Synonyms of trinary

Forms of trinary

pluraltrinaries

Origin of trinary

From Late Latin trīnārius (“consisting of three”), from Latin trīni (“triple, three each”) + -ārius.

Words formed from trinary

Phrases with trinary

Questions about trinary

What does trinary mean?
Trinary means a trinary star.
What is trinary the alternative form of?
Trinary is the alternative form of ternary.
What part of speech is trinary?
Trinary is a noun.
What is the plural of trinary?
The plural of trinary is trinaries.

Words near trinary in the dictionary

  1. trinall
  2. trinaphthylene
  3. trinaries
  4. trinarization
  5. trinarizations
  6. trinary
  7. trinary star
  8. trinary star system
  9. trinary star systems
  10. trinary stars
  11. trination

Source and license

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