persistence

Academic Word List, sublist 10.

About 6.32 uses per million words.

Meaning

1. noun The property of being persistent.

   You've got to admire her persistence. She's asked him out every day for a month even though she keeps turning him down.

2. noun Of data, the property of continuing to exist after the termination of the program.

   Once written to a disk file, the data has persistence: it will still be there tomorrow when we run the next program.

3. noun Continuation of the previous day's weather (particularly temperature and precipitation statistics).
4. noun The number of times an operation can be iteratively applied to a number before it reaches a permanently constant state.

   The persistence of the number 39 under the operation of multiplying the digits of the number is three, because 3x9 = 27, 2x7 = 14, and 1x4 = 4, and no further iterations will change the number again.

Similar words

persistency tenaciousness tenacity perseveration doggedness perseverance pertinacity continuity perseverence persevering

Often followed by

of in and is with to or that was

Word family

persist persisted persistences persistent persistently persisting persists