lossy

American  

[law-see, los-ee] / ˈlɔ si, ˈlɒs i /

adjective

Electricity.

1. (of a material or transmission line) causing appreciable loss or dissipation of energy.

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lossy British  

/ ˈlɒsɪ /

adjective

1. (of a dielectric material, transmission line, etc) designed to have a high attenuation; dissipating energy Compare lossless

   lossy line

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Etymology

Origin of lossy

First recorded in 1945–50; loss + -y ¹

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

lossy

“Text is just a lossy representation of the real world,” says Kent Rollins, chief product officer at General Intuition, and former director of the Fortnite ecosystem at Epic Games.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026

Physicists and engineers have struggled for decades with how small optical resonators can be made without making them very lossy, which is equivalent to asking how small you can make a semiconductor device.

From Science Daily ● Dec. 6, 2023

You can still play hi-resolution audio tracks, but that’ll result in lossy streaming, so you’ll want to keep a wired solution around if you’re big on those 24-bit 96kHz files.

From The Verge ● Sep. 1, 2021

JPEGs take advantage of lossy compression, a process that removes aspects of a picture undetectable to the human eye, such as slight variations in color.

From Slate ● Oct. 14, 2019

In order to decrease file sizes significantly, we must employ lossy compression algorithms.

From Library of Congress Workshop on Etexts by Library of Congress

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