Skip to content
OneKitly

residual

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United States//ɹɪˈzɪd͡ʒ.u.əl//
  • //ɹɪˈzɪd͡ʒ.ʊəl//
  • //ɹɪˈzɪd͡ʒ.əl//
  • //ɹɪˈzɪd.jʊəl//
  • //ɹɪˈzɪd.jəl//

Of, relating to, or remaining as a residue; left over.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of, relating to, or remaining as a residue; left over.

    Yet certain films leave a residual memory—such as Psycho: many people still feel uneasy showering in a motel bathroom.

    Abolitionists argued that race had no place in a free and democratic society as a dividing line. Economic and social policies and practices, they argued, should be race-neutral and egalitarian. Yet despite these racially egalitarian values, much abolitionist rhetoric exhibited a strong residual commitment to racialist thinking and a palpable devotion to white supremacy.

Etymology

Recorded since 1570. From residue, itself borrowed during the Middle English period from Old French residu (Modern French résidu), from Latin residuum (“a remainder”), the neuter inflection of residuus (“remaining, left over”), perfect participle of resideō (“to remain behind”), from re- (“back, again”) + sedeō (“to sit, to reside”).

noun

  1. 1

    A remainder left over at the end of some process.

  2. 2

    Payments made to performers, writers and directors when a recorded broadcast is repeated.

    The tentative deal announced this week by the Writers Guild of America includes many industry-specific aspects, such as the size of writers’ rooms and improved residuals for streaming.

    Because, despite his very small role as shark victim Alex Kintner when he was 12, Voorhees is still being paid residuals – royalties – 50 years later. Every time Jaws is on TV, he earns money. […] “It pays to die,” is how he put it in a recent interview with Syfy.

  3. 3

    The difference between the observed value and the estimated value of the quantity of interest.

  4. 4

    A spiritual presence left behind in a place as a result of a person's death or some other significant event.

Forms

plural
residuals
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).