optimistic
- 1Tending to expect the best possible outcome in any situation, and to feel confident that things will turn out well.
Like a gardener who plants seeds fully expecting every one of them to bloom.
The coach remained optimistic about the team's chances despite the early loss.
Economists are cautiously optimistic that growth will continue into next year.
Oppositepessimistic
Note
Built from optimist plus -ic, it describes an outlook but transfers easily to things: optimistic plans, an optimistic view. Applied to plans, forecasts or names, it often carries a dry edge, meaning hopeful beyond what the facts support. Railway Magazine in 1944 used it of grand old railway titles, like the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast, that never reached the places their names promised.
- 2Permitting multiple processes to work on the same data simultaneously, and checking for conflicts only when changes need to be written back.
Like a shared document where everyone types freely and the software only flags overlaps at save time.
The system uses optimistic locking, assuming that conflicting edits will be rare.
An optimistic design lets many users update the same records at once and resolves clashes later.
Oppositepessimistic
Note
A computing term that turns the everyday hopeful sense into a design bet: conflicts will be rare, so nobody has to wait. It appears in fixed pairings such as optimistic concurrency and optimistic locking. Transactions proceed without locking the shared data, and the check comes at commit time. A clashing write is then rolled back or retried rather than blocked in advance.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of optimistic apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Formed from "optimist" combined with the suffix "-ic".