predetermined

UK/ˈpɹidɪˈtɜːmɪnd/

adjectiveB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Predetermined means decided in advance, before anything began. The route, the budget, the order of speakers — all settled beforehand.

This is the everyday, administrative cousin of predestined, and the difference matters: predestined suggests fate, while predetermined suggests a person with a plan and a diary. You meet it in procedure and science — a predetermined time limit, a predetermined set of questions, samples taken at predetermined intervals. In an experiment, saying the criteria were predetermined is a claim about honesty, since it means nobody chose them after seeing the results.

Definitions of predetermined

1adjectivepredeterminedDecided or arranged in advance.B2
“The prizes were awarded on predetermined criteria.”
synonyms: prearranged, preset

Where it comes from

From pre + determined.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 8 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

predetermined in the wild

The oldest flowers grow close to the base and new flowers are produced as the shoot grows in height, with no predetermined growth limit.
Raceme
Destiny, sometimes also called fate (from Latin fatum 'decree, prediction, destiny, fate'), is a predetermined course of events.
Destiny
A measurement may be said to be repeatable when this variation is smaller than a predetermined acceptance criterion.
Repeatability
A European bond option is an option to buy or sell a bond at a certain date in future for a predetermined price.
Bond option
An American bond option is an option to buy or sell a bond on or before a certain date in future for a predetermined price.
Bond option

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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.

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