capability
Pluralcapabilities
- 1The power or ability to bring about a particular outcome or result.
The factory's capability to produce thousands of units daily impressed the investors.
Without proper training, the staff lacked the capability to handle emergencies.
Similarability, capacity, power, competence
Oppositeinability, incapacity
Note
Two grammars share this sense. Used uncountably, it names a general power, as when staff lack the capability to cope. Used countably, and usually in the plural, it names the particular things an organization can do, often with a noun in front: a police force elevating its surveillance capabilities. The plural reads more like an inventory than a quality.
- 2A digital token that lets a user or program interact in a defined way with an object protected by access control.
Each process receives a capability that grants read-only access to the shared directory.
The operating system revokes a capability when the user logs out.
Note
Security engineers use the word for an unforgeable token that does two jobs at once: it names a protected object and carries the exact operations its holder may perform. A file descriptor is the everyday case, usable only through the proper system calls. In a capability machine, as Richard Kain and Carl Landwehr put it in 1987, a user's rights are simply the capabilities they can obtain.
Practice
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Origin
Formed in Modern English by adding the suffix "-ity" to the adjective "capable."