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Allin

capability

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti//
  • United Kingdom//ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ə.ti//
  • Canada//ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ə.ti//
  • Canada/[ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ə.ɾi]/
  • Australia//ˌkæɪ.pəˈbɪl.ə.ti//

The power or ability to generate an outcome.

noun

  1. 1

    The power or ability to generate an outcome.

    And that sight will become more common in the coming years, as the city’s police pursue an ambitious campaign to install thousands of cameras to elevate their surveillance capabilities.

  2. 2

    A digital token allowing a user or process to interact in a specified way with an object that is subject to access control.

    A file descriptor can be considered a capability that can only be leveraged using the appropriate system calls, passing it as an argument.

    Enforcing a security policy means controlling the rights users can acquire to data. In a capability machine, a user’s rights are defined by the capabilities he (or a process acting on his behalf) can obtain and the access rights conferred by those capabilities.

Etymology

Formed in Modern English as capable + -ity.

Forms

plural
capabilities
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).