Skip to content
Allin

partial

adjectivenounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɑːʃəl//
  • United States//ˈpɑɹʃəl//

Existing as a part or portion; incomplete.

adjective

  1. 1

    Existing as a part or portion; incomplete.

    So far, I have only pieced together a partial account of the incident.

  2. 2

    Describing a property that holds only when an algorithm terminates.

    It's easy to prove partial correctness, but it's not obvious that it is also totally correct.

  3. 3

    Biased in favor of a person, side, or point of view, especially when dealing with a competition or dispute.

    The referee is blatantly partial!

    God is not partial; he does not play favorites.

    17th century, Alexander Pope, a letter partial parent

  4. 4

    Having a predilection for something.

    not partial to an ostentatious display

    But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal it, he must find it out.

    of

  5. 5

    Of or relating to a partial derivative or partial differential.

  6. 6

    Subordinate.

  7. 7

    Having a wordplay element, but no definition.

    Twelve six- letter lights form a group; these have only partial clues.

    Fourteen solutions are men of a kind. Each begins with a different letter, and their (partial) clues begin with the same letter as their solutions.

Etymology

From Middle English partiall, parcial, from Old French parcial (“biased or particular”), from Late Latin partiālis (“of or pertaining to a part”), from Latin pars (“part”).

noun

  1. 1

    A partial derivative: a derivative with respect to one independent variable of a function in multiple variables while holding the other variables constant.

  2. 2

    Any of the sine waves which make up a complex tone; often an overtone or harmonic of the fundamental.

  3. 3

    dentures that replace only some of the natural teeth

  4. 4

    An incomplete fingerprint

  5. 5

    A fragment of a template containing markup.

    In fact, as seen in Chapters 5 and 6, the resulting document is usually the product of rendering a layout, which yields the rendering of the template at hand, which in turn can invoke the rendering of other templates and/or one or more partials.

  6. 6

    A repetition of an exercise during which the range of motion (amplitude) is not maximized.

    Research tells us that eccentrics, heavy partials, and static exercise may require several days or weeks of recovery time.

  7. 7

    slangA fursuit that does not fully cover the wearer's body.

verb

  1. 1

    To take the partial regression coefficient.

Forms

plural
partials
comparative
more partial
superlative
most partial
past tense
participle (US) partialed, partialled
third person singular
partials
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).