DictionaryAI

persistent

adjective
USpur-SIS-tuhnt/pɚˈsɪstənt/UKpuh-SIS-tuhnt/pəˈsɪstənt/

7 meanings of persistent

Practice

  1. 1
    adjective
    Refusing to give up or let go, often despite difficulty or discouragement.

    Her persistent lobbying eventually wore down the committee's resistance.

    The detective was persistent, following every lead long after others had quit.

    Similartenacious, determined, dogged, relentless, persevering

    Oppositeirresolute, wavering

    Note

    The root sense, and the one closest to the Latin: persistō meant "continue steadfastly," and English now reads the word as persist plus -ent. Applied to people and their efforts, as in persistent lobbying or a persistent detective, it can praise determination or complain of pestering, depending on who is pursued. Used of a cough, it has already drifted toward the "long-lasting" meaning.

  2. 2
    adjective
    Repeating again and again in an insistent, hard-to-ignore way.

    Reporters bombarded the minister with persistent demands for a statement.

    The persistent ringing of the phone interrupted the meeting three times.

    Similarinsistent, incessant, repeated, constant, relentless

    Oppositeoccasional, intermittent, sporadic

  3. 3
    adjective
    Continuing without interruption over a long, indefinite period.

    Persistent inflation eroded household savings throughout the decade.

    Doctors traced his fatigue to a persistent low-grade infection.

    Similarchronic, ongoing, lasting, prolonged

    Oppositetemporary, transient, brief

    Note

    Here the persistence belongs to a situation rather than a will: rumors, barriers, inflation, a symptom that will not clear. It differs from the "insistently repeated" meaning in rhythm. Knocking comes in bursts, while persistent rumors simply never go away. Medicine and social science rely on it for problems that last, as in persistent barriers to sustaining relationships.

  4. 4
    adjective
    Of data or a data structure: remaining in existence after the program that created it has ended, rather than being temporary.

    User preferences are written to persistent storage and reloaded at the next launch.

    The framework keeps session data persistent across server restarts.

    Similarpermanent, durable, nonvolatile

    Oppositevolatile, transient, temporary, ephemeral

    Note

    In computing the contrast is with transient. Data held only while a program runs vanishes with it, while data written to a disk file is still there tomorrow. Programmers use the word before a noun (persistent storage) and after a verb (the data becomes persistent). It shares its opposite with the probability term for states.

  5. 5
    adjective
    Of a plant part: remaining attached past maturity instead of falling off.

    The persistent sepals remain on the fruit long after the petals have fallen.

    Many young oaks keep persistent foliage well into the cold months.

    Oppositedeciduous, caducous

    Note

    A botanist's term for parts that stay put after their season. Pine cones keep persistent scales, and Rudolf Schuster's The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America (1992) applies it to liverwort structures. It sits before the name of the part, as in persistent scales or persistent sepals. It describes the organ, not the plant as a whole.

  6. 6
    adjective
    Of a state in a stochastic process: one that the process is certain to return to, rather than eventually leaving for good.

    The symmetric random walk on a line has a persistent origin, returning to it with certainty.

    Classifying each state as persistent or transient is the first step in analyzing the chain.

    Similarrecurrent

    Oppositetransient

    Note

    A classification from the theory of stochastic processes that applies to states rather than whole processes. A persistent state is one the process returns to with probability one, so it is visited again and again. Recurrent is an equivalent name for the same idea, and transient names the states the process may leave for good.

  7. 7
    adjective
    Of a fractal process: having a positive Brown function, so that past trends tend to continue rather than reverse.

    A persistent fractional Brownian motion shows trends that reinforce themselves over time.

    Analysts modeled the river levels as a persistent process with long-range correlation.

    Note

    Mathematics takes the everyday idea of keeping on and gives it a test. A fractal process counts as persistent when its Brown function is positive, so a rise tends to be followed by another rise. The word describes the whole process, unlike the term for single states, which sorts individual states within a process.

Practice

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Origin

From Latin persistentem, the present participle of persistō ("to continue steadfastly"); by surface analysis, persist + -ent.