separability
|se-pa-ra-bi-li-ty|
🇺🇸
/ˌsɛpərəˈbɪləti/
🇬🇧
/ˌsep(ə)rəˈbɪlɪti/
ability to be separated
Etymology
'separability' originates from English, specifically formed from the adjective/verb 'separate' plus the suffix '-ability', where 'separate' comes from Latin 'separatus' (from 'separare') meaning 'to set apart' and the suffix '-ability' denotes 'capacity or fitness'.
'separability' was formed in English by adding the productive suffix '-ability' to 'separate'. 'Separate' entered English via Old French/Middle English from Latin 'separare' (past participle 'separatus'), so the modern English word reflects that evolution from Latin through French into English.
Initially related to the action 'to set apart' (from Latin), the term evolved into a nominal form denoting the 'quality or capacity of being separated' and has been extended to technical senses (e.g., mathematical separability, separability in classification) in modern usage.
Meanings by Part of Speech
Noun 1
the quality, state, or condition of being separable; the ability of something to be divided or taken apart.
The separability of the device's components made maintenance straightforward.
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Noun 2
in topology and related areas of mathematics, the property of a space having a countable dense subset (i.e., being separable).
The separability of the metric space guarantees the existence of a countable dense subset.
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Noun 3
in classification and machine learning, the degree to which classes in a dataset can be distinguished or separated (e.g., linear separability).
The separability of the training data affected whether a simple linear model could classify the examples correctly.
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Last updated: 2025/08/26 17:01