optional
Something that is not compulsory, especially part of an academic course.
Adjective
- Not compulsory; left to personal choice; elective.
- On that beach clothing is entirely optional.
- Do you need to wear eyeliner? As with any makeup step, eyeliner is completely optional. From an artistic perspective, if you are wearing eyeshadow, I almost always recommend wearing eyeliner, unless your eyelids and...
Synonyms: facultative
Antonyms: compulsory mandatory necessary obligatory binding compulsatory decretory forced imperative involuntary nonoptional required unbewised unvoluntary
Origin
Etymology tree English option Proto-Indo-European *h₂el-der.? Proto-Italic *-ālis Latin -ālisbor. Old French -albor. ▲ Latin -ālis Old French -elbor. ▲ Latin -ālisbor. Middle English -al English -al English optional From option + -al.
Synonyms
discretionary elective facultative free noncompulsory nonmandatory nonobligate nonobligatory nonrequired nonrequisite optional optionary unrequired volitional voluntary
Antonyms
non-optional nonoptional compulsory mandatory obligate obligatory required requisite
Related
Derived
Noun
- Something that is not compulsory, especially part of an academic course.
- In various programming languages, a kind of variable that is assigned a specific data type but may or may not hold an actual value.
- In functional languages, there is a data type called the option type, also called the maybe type. Its purpose is to encapsulate a value, which is returned from a function. […] In Java 8, the Optional class has been...