parsimony
/ˈpɑɹ.səˌmoʊ.ni/
parsimony means great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily. It carries an Arena rating of 1500, earned across 2 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, parsimony ranks #1,386 of 25,264 for Qualifying, #2,351 of 14,308 for Most Malleable Words, #2,382 of 14,297 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #2,382 of 14,414 for Most Elegant Words.
parsimony is pronounced /ˈpɑɹ.səˌmoʊ.ni/.
Why “parsimony” is a great word
Extreme or excessive frugality, or the principle of using the fewest possible resources or assumptions. From Middle English parcimonie, from Middle French parsimonie, from Latin parsimōnia ("frugality, sparingness"), from parcere ("to spare") + -monia (suffix denoting action or state). Unlike "frugality," which implies a prudent and positive management of resources, or "thrift," which suggests a wise economy for the future, parsimony is frugality stripped of its virtue, emphasizing an extreme, often unreasonable, reluctance to spend. It is the single bulb burning in a cavernous house, the miser counting his coins by candle-end, the silence that follows when someone won’t spare a word of comfort—a life curated not by want, but by the cold, governing principle of less, the fear of waste that becomes its own waste.
Etymology
From Middle English parcimonie, from Middle French parsimonie, from Latin parsimōnia (“frugality, sparingness”), from pars-, past participle stem of parcere (“to spare”), + -monia, suffix signifying action, state, or condition.
noun
- Great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily.“Near-synonyms: (usually admirable) frugality, economy, thrift, thriftiness; (excessive degree) tightness, stinginess; (extreme degree) miserliness; see also Thesaurus:frugal, Thesaurus:stingy”
- The quality or characteristic of using the fewest resources or explanations to solve a problem.“We used three search heuristics, Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and maximum parsimony, to construct phylogenies from unique COI haplotypes and used default parameters for analyses unless otherwise noted.”
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