Word.ws English Dictionary

Wirth's law

Wirth's law proper noun: the observation that, over time, software gets slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster.

Proper noun

Wirth's law

  1. The observation that, over time, software gets slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster.

Origin of Wirth's law

Named after computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".

Questions about Wirth's law

What does Wirth's law mean?
Wirth's law means the observation that, over time, software gets slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster.
What part of speech is Wirth's law?
Wirth's law is a proper noun.

Words near Wirth's law in the dictionary

  1. Wirrinya
  2. Wirsung
  3. Wirt
  4. Wirt County
  5. Wirth
  6. Wirth's law
  7. Wirths
  8. Wirtshaus
  9. Wirtshäuser
  10. Wirtz
  11. Wirtzes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Wirth's law (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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