Parsimonious

Research

Marked by economy of means — in theory and explanation, preferring the simplest account that fits the evidence, per Occam's Razor; in statistics, a parsimonious model uses the fewest parameters needed to fit the data without overfitting it.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — parsimonious merriam-webster.com accessed 17 September 2026
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Simplicity”, Alan Baker (first published 29 October 2004; substantive revision 16 May 2022) plato.stanford.edu accessed 22 September 2026

Merriam-Webster defines it as “exhibiting or marked by parsimony; especially: frugal to the point of stinginess”, and secondarily “sparing, restrained”. Formed from parsimony plus -ous; first recorded 1598.

The theoretical sense is set out in Alan Baker’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on simplicity, which opens: “Most philosophers believe that, other things being equal, simpler theories are better.” It distinguishes elegance, the economy of a theory’s principles, from parsimony, the economy of the kinds of entity it postulates, and gives the principle as “Other things being equal, if T₁ is more ontologically parsimonious than T₂ then it is rational to prefer T₁ to T₂”, with Ockham’s Razor in its classic form: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”

The dictionary citation above sources the word, its history and its ordinary meaning. The technical sense this entry defines — which the dictionary does not record, as this page previously stated — is now sourced to a signed, dated reference entry in the discipline’s own literature.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.