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exhaustive

UK/ɪɡˈzɔːstɪv/US/ɪɡˈzɔstɪv/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,284 of 15,258leans written

Exhaustive means leaving nothing out, however small. An exhaustive search, an exhaustive list, exhaustive testing.

It is a claim about completeness rather than effort, which is why not an exhaustive list is the standard disclaimer. It is a different word from exhausting, though an exhaustive search usually is.

Definitions of exhaustive

  1. 1adjectiveexhaustiveLeaving nothing out, however small.C1

    “After an exhaustive study of the evidence, the committee reached its decision.”

exhaustive is a quality.

Where it comes from

  1. Medieval Latin

    exhaustīvus

  2. English, today

    exhaustive

Borrowed from Medieval Latin exhaustīvus, from la + exhaustus.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

exhaustive in the wild

  • However, not all mutually exclusive events are collectively exhaustive.

    Mutual exclusivity

  • The cases must be collectively exhaustive, ensuring that all possible situations are considered.

    Proof by exhaustion

  • In probability theory and logic, a set of events is jointly or collectively exhaustive if at least one of the events must occur.

    Collectively exhaustive events

  • Another way to describe collectively exhaustive events is that their union must cover all the events within the entire sample space.

    Collectively exhaustive events

  • The event A and its complement are mutually exclusive and exhaustive.

    Complementary event

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.