Performant is still not an adjective

15 Comments

• It is an adjective in French, in which it means exactly what it's intended to mean in the quoted sentence.
  I've always been wondering what's the correct word in English. Does one exist?
  Should we write "speed efficient" or something?
  

• I guess that means it has taken over from "do".
  The excessive use of "do" in place of the actual verb drives me crazy but it seems to have become less abused in the last year or 2.
  
  eg "I'm going to do an article" instead of "I'm going to write an article"
  

• Most words enter the lexicon in this manner, someone made will "make it up" and use the newly created word in context that other people can understand and it spreads.
  
  Ginormous wasn't a word until someone put together "gigantic" and "enormous", but alas, people know what it means and it is in the dictionary now after being commonly used.
  
  Is something being "performant" any more ridiculous than to "google" something else?
  

• In Dutch it's an adjective as well.
  
  Even if it's not in the English dictionary, I like it. People know what you're talking about, and as stated by Fabrice, there's no better alternative that i can think of.
  

• You can't think of "efficient?"
  
  "Deep Zoom enables the ability to zoom almost arbitrarily large images in Silverlight in an efficient manner."
  
  Can we all refactor C# but not English? We are talking about efficiency right? Or are we?
  
  But here's the thing, even if you were to force it into the language, what does it mean? If perform is your root, does it mean performs poorly or well? It doesn't even offer a clue as to which it is. I can't be the only person who thinks that the word makes the speaker sound ignorant and stupid.
  
  Even if you assume it means it performs well, how so? Does it get up on the table and dance? Can it sing? Does it scale well, have great UI, work quickly or cure cancer? It doesn't mean anything.
  
  And if we can get people to stop saying "gonna go ahead and" in demos, I'll be happy. :)
  

• In French, "performant" does not mean "efficient". The word for "efficient" is "efficace".
  Performant is an adjective that qualifies the performance of something or someone (in French at least). Efficient qualifies the efficiency of something or someone.
  Still in French, one may say that something is performant if it has a high efficiency.
  

• No, that would be "leverage," every time I hear that word I feel like throwing up... like right now.
  

• Jeff,
  
  Efficient has a different undertone (to me at least, maybe because of my Dutch mother tongue?).
  
  I would use performant to describe technical things, optimized for speed and performance; whereas with efficient, I think of a well thought-out user interface...
  My mind:
  - Performant: technical
  - Efficient: functional
  
  It's nitpicking though, as long as everyone knows what you're talking about, right? :)
  

• Well, words only become words when enough people use them to describe something.
  
  I would guess that performant would break into webster pretty soon.
  
  Speaking of made up words: refactor isn't a word either, but everyone uses it/knows what it means.
  

• Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. All words were made up at one time or another.
  

• Well, I need it for describing a "highly performant" grain unloading equipment. I don't believe that any word would convey the meaning as efficiently as "performant". I am talking technology, speed, action and quality here. I am not afraid to use it in my translation pertaining to the technical domain, although, or maybe especially because I am a linguist.
  

• Performant is not a synonym for efficient. Race cars are performant, but they are not efficient. If high efficiency cars are efficient, why wouldn't high performance cars be performant?
  

• The "but everyone knows what you're talking about" line falls down immediately when you have a thread like this - that's obviously not true.
  
  Phil just over simplifies what makes a high performance car high performing, it's not just one thing. Efficiency is simply a measure of how much input energy is returned in useful work, that's easy. A high performance car is lots of things - top speed, acceleration, braking, cooling, capacity, whatever else you can think of and some subjective combination of the lot, at some subjective point, becomes worth describing as "performant."
  
  The reason I don't like performant is that it's usually used to replace details with a vague weasel word.
  

• "Deep Zoom enables the ability to zoom almost arbitrarily large images in Silverlight in a performant manner."
  Oh, you mean it's fast and efficient? (I read the Microsoft description, it's both)
  
  Apart from that I have a couple of other quibbles with that sentence.
  Now, you can "grant" the ability to zoom, or you can "enable" the user to zoom or "enable" zooming, but how do you "enable" an ability? An ability is the quality of being able to do something. "Enable" means to give that ability to someone or something ("en"-able). To enable an ability is redundant.
  
  Also, I thought "zoom" was intransitive and you zoomed "into" images, I didn't know you zoomed the images themselves? Is that like magnifying them? :)
  
  
  People above have already supplied the correct English terms for "performant" in their posts.
  
  ""highly performant" grain unloading equipment."
  Why not "high performing"?
  
  "what makes a high performance car high performing" - you already said it, twice, why do you need a new word here?
  
  
  At any rate, I hope Microsoft is able to monetize Silverlight by leveraging highly performant, bleeding edge features such as Deep Zoom in this, and core competency legacy product stacks, to deliver a sizeable rich media experience value-add, while aligning the enterprise with best practices and going forward, grow the market and synergize with strategic alliance partners.
  
  I notice spellchecker has underlined "performant in my post - something wrong with spellchecker? :)
  

• Where's the Académie Anglaise when you need it?
  
  French words are so passé.