autoincrement
|au-to-in-cre-ment|
🇺🇸
/ˌɔːtoʊɪnˈkrɛmənt/
🇬🇧
/ˌɔːtəʊɪnˈkrɛmənt/
automatic increase
Etymology
'autoincrement' originates from a compound of two roots: 'auto-' from Greek 'autos', where 'autos' meant 'self', and 'increment' from Latin 'incrementum', where 'incrementum' meant 'an increase'.
'autoincrement' formed in modern computing English by compounding 'auto-' and 'increment' (often written earlier as 'auto-increment'); 'increment' itself derives from Latin 'incrementum' (from 'increscere'/'increscere' meaning 'to grow in').
Initially the parts meant 'self' + 'increase'; in computing the compound came to specifically mean an automatic, typically sequential increase applied to a stored numeric value (e.g., an ID field).
Meanings by Part of Speech
Noun 1
a database or programming attribute/feature in which a numeric field is automatically increased (typically by 1) when a new record or entry is created.
The id column uses autoincrement to assign unique identifiers to new rows.
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Verb 1
to cause a numeric value or field to increase automatically (usually by a fixed step) when an event occurs, such as inserting a new record.
Set the primary key to autoincrement so the database will autoincrement the id on insert.
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Last updated: 2025/11/26 03:36