graceful degradation
- noun
- /ˈɡreɪs.fəl ˌdɛɡrəˈdeɪʃən/
- Specialized
:
degradación elegante
- During the power outage, the server showed graceful degradation by allowing access to cached data while minimizing disruptions.
Examples
-
The application handles graceful degradation gracefully, so when a function fails, users are notified without service interruption.
-
Monitoring systems will alert the pilot to potential problems, and subsystems will be able to fail with graceful degradation in performance, without catastrophic failure.
Academic text (2002) -
The software was designed for graceful degradation, so if the network fails, users can still access basic features.
Antonyms
How Graceful
- Specialized
9
5.5
- Specialized
95
5.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun phrase is compositionally transparent: 'graceful' (elegant/controlled) modifies 'degradation' (a decline), so a learner who knows both words can infer a decline that happens in an elegant or controlled way. Although the full technical implication for systems (maintaining limited functionality on failure) is domain-specific, the core meaning is directly derivable from the constituents and follows a regular adjective+noun composition.
Etymology
The phrase graceful degradation may come from the image of a dancer who stumbles but keeps moving in a calm, smooth way: graceful means smooth and elegant and degradation means breaking down. So it means a machine or website 'keeps working' in a smaller way instead of stopping all at once.