hygiene

B2 · Upper Intermediate Uncountable noun Medicine Academic

n. the area of science that studies how to stay healthy and prevent illness.

n. the branch of medical science that deals with the preservation of health.

“She decided to study public hygiene to help improve her city's water system.”

“Nineteenth-century advancements in the science of hygiene significantly reduced mortality rates in rapidly growing urban centres.”

C2 · Proficiency Uncountable noun Computing Technical · Slang

n. a way of writing code so that names of things do not get mixed up by accident.

n. a property of macro expansion systems that ensures identifiers introduced by a macro do not accidentally capture identifiers in the surrounding code.

“The programmer checked the macro hygiene to make sure the variables were safe.”

“Without proper hygiene in the macro system, the compiler might inadvertently shadow local variables, leading to unpredictable runtime behaviour.”