outcome
Pluraloutcomes
- 1Something that is produced or happens as a result of an event or process.
The merger's outcome reshaped the entire industry within a year.
Doctors could not predict the outcome of such a risky operation.
Similarresult, consequence, effect, conclusion, upshot
Oppositecause
Note
Built from out and come, the word names whatever comes out of something: the finished car that emerges from engineers' work, or the verdict that emerges from a trial or an operation. It usually takes of before its source (the outcome of the talks). Fate is a near synonym, but fate suggests what was bound to happen. An outcome is simply what did happen.
- 2The final result or score of a sporting contest.
The outcome of the derby hinged on a last-minute penalty.
Bookmakers adjusted their odds as the outcome grew clearer in the second half.
Similarresult
Note
Sports writing narrows the word to the scoreline itself. BBC Sport's 2011 report "International friendly: England 1-0 Spain" argues that perspective "must be applied immediately to the outcome." There the outcome is the bare 1–0, set against Spain's long spells of control. The word is chiefly a sporting one in this use. Writers reach for it when the result and the run of play tell different stories.
- 3The expected or desired result of a learning experience, showing what a learner should know or be able to do.
The course was redesigned to align each module with measurable outcomes.
Instructors assess whether students have met the intended outcome for the term.
Note
Education turns the word toward the future. These are results a course plans for, unlike the everyday sense, which names results that have already happened. The word is mostly plural and mostly met in the phrase learning outcomes, the statements of knowledge and skills that a syllabus sets out and assessment checks. Learning objective covers much the same ground.
- 4The result of a random trial, treated as a single element of the sample space.
Listing every outcome of two dice gives thirty-six possibilities.
The probability of each outcome sums to one across the whole sample space.
Similarresult
Note
The mathematician's version is the smallest unit of chance: a three on a die, heads on a coin. Outcomes are the individual points of the sample space, and events are sets of them, so "rolling an even number" is an event made of three outcomes. Keep the two apart. Everyday speech blurs them in the general sense, but here an outcome is never a collection.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of outcome apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Formed from the words "out" and "come."