“Performant” is not a word

boulter.com

4 pointsguan5 comments

Headline trolled me good, I was all ready to post my screed about how it is, in fact, a perfectly cromulent word because people use it all the time and everyone else knows what they mean and English isn't a dead language defined only by what you'd find in dead-tree dictionaries.

Of course, the post basically goes on to say you should just keep using the word, so no ranting required.

I dislike the word simply because it's vague. If it's fast, just say so. I have yet to see an instance where this word captured some subtle shade of meaning that some other word could not.

I have understood “performant” to suggest a soundness of design that causes something to be “fast”. In the context of algorithms, certainly the distinction is blurred, but in other, higher-level contexts, it can be meaningful.

The suffix -ant can turn verbs into nouns or adjectives, which means something can be a peformant performant.

I suggest using the -y suffix for the adjective form and -ant for the noun form. Then you can say the performant is performy, or performier than before.

Here’s a discussion on Stack Exchange:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38945/what-is-wro...

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