adjective
- involving or causing the loss of data or information during processing or transmission
Usage: technical; computing
Examples
- JPEG is a lossy compression format that reduces file size by discarding some image data.
- The lossy audio codec made the music sound slightly different from the original.
- Engineers prefer lossless formats when data integrity is critical, avoiding lossy alternatives.
- The lossy transmission resulted in some packets being dropped during the network transfer.
- Video streaming services often use lossy compression to reduce bandwidth requirements.
- The lossy algorithm sacrificed some quality for faster processing speeds.