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SO has quite a few questions using the word "truthiness" to mean the truth value of an expression, when evaluated as a boolean, regardless of its original type. It's very useful in dynamic languages.

So my question is, is this a real term, and if so were we using it before Stephen Colbert made it popular? Or did we just adopt it afterward? In that case, what is the correct term with the definition I gave above?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness Make of it what you wish. ;-> –  Jeff Grigg Oct 29 '11 at 17:05
I think it's usually meant somewhat pejoratively (certainly by Stephen Colbert) since there is more arbitrariness and more chance for things to wrong compared to actually true/false values. But it's common enough that it's helpful to have a word for it, and "truthiness" gets the idea across pretty concisely. So I would consider it legitimate, but legitimacy is determined by popular usage over time, so at this point there is no definitive or authoritative answer to your question. –  psr Oct 31 '11 at 19:01

7 Answers 7

up vote 4 down vote accepted

There's a lot of debate over truthiness.

Merriam-Webster defines it as:

  1. truthiness (noun)

Oxford Dictionaries Online defines it as:

[mass noun] informal

early 19th century (in the sense 'truthfulness'): coined in the modern sense by the US humorist Stephen Colbert

It was used a little bit on Usenet prior to Stephen Colbert, but usually explained as soon as used, such as "the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true".

Back to programming. Regardless of the origin, this modern sense of "truth from the gut, even if not true" is clearly incorrect most of the time when discussing Boolean logic and truth tables: this if statement is definitely true, and that while statement is false until (i > k). My gut feeling doesn't come into it.

If you're using truthiness in programming, most likely you're using the rare 19th century meaning of truthfulness, and it would be both clearer (and arguably more correct) to use truthfulness or simply truth.



Of course, English changes as usage changes, and some people have started to use truthiness to mean truth in programming. However, I would advise against truthiness to avoid any ambiguity of meaning ("real absolute truth" vs. "my gut feeling of truth, regardless of the facts").

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I personally have always used the word truthfulness, when I read truthiness, I don't even consider it a real word. –  Ramhound Oct 31 '11 at 11:49

It's a term that is known and acceptable within certain circles (for example JavaScript Boolean comparisons). As such, it is a "real" term. By virtue of being used it becomes legitimate.

All such terms come from somewhere - they don't pop into the world fully formed and with an established meanings (for example - software bugs didn't have the meaning they have now when electronic computers just started existing).

Whether it is academically accepted - that's a different matter. As far as I know there is no formal term for this fuzzy meaning of boolean values..

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@Downvoter - care to comment? –  Oded Oct 31 '11 at 10:40
Actually the terms "bug" as a problem was used before modern computers. Edison used in a letter 1787. It was common terms for engineering problems back then. The Grace Hopper story as a bit of irony that the bug they found was really a bug. –  Jim C Oct 31 '11 at 11:06
@JimC - Fair enough, but still, when people say "bug" today, they don't mean the same thing as they did in the days of Edison. –  Oded Oct 31 '11 at 11:22
Edison wrote in 1878: It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that 'Bugs' — as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached. Sounds very similar to modern software bugs to me. –  Hugo Oct 31 '11 at 15:28

I regard truthy as a legitimate term in use over JavaScript evaluation. Douglas Crockford's book on JavaScript - 'JavaScript the Good Parts' defines the terms that JavaScript 'if' evaluates as true to be 'truthy'. Equally he defines the terms that JavaScript evaluates to false as 'falsy'. He also uses the term to highlight the way that the '==' evaluation works in JavaScript (which is different to the way that many JavaScript users seem to believe it works).

From Crockford's The Elements of JavaScript Style

The == operator should not be used for comparing values with true because it does type coercion. If our intent is to determine if d.w.sv.checked is the boolean value true, then we must use the === operator. If we only care that a value is truthy (and not falsy) then it is better to not use an equality operator at all.

For example, because of type coercion., 1 == true is true, but 1 === true is false. The == operator can hide type errors.

In this context the term is both legitimate and useful.

As a further illustration of true and false in this context these cases are illustrative.

'' == '0' // false    
0 == '' // true
0 == '0' // true

false == 'false' // false
false == '0' // true

false == undefined // false
false == null // false
null == undefined // true

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+1, and Python does the same thing. [] is evaluated to false when used as a boolean, etc. –  Izkata Jul 26 '12 at 14:20
+1 This should be the answer. I've often found my self talking about the "truthiness" of various data structures. Or more frequently, I find myself saying "X is falsy" where X is ideas like 0, None, [], and so on. –  Lego Stormtroopr Dec 4 '13 at 5:54

Truthiness has been a word long before Stephen Colbert has used it. I could swear I've seen it in logic/AI papers, and in some physics papers, too, but can't seem to find a reference to one that predates Stephen Colbert's show.

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The problem is, now that the "Colbert" definition has become popular, it's going to be that much harder to find obscure references in older works :-) –  Dean Harding Oct 31 '11 at 10:28
I couldn't find any from ACM or IEEE before 2006. –  Hugo Oct 31 '11 at 10:40
@DeanHarding There are ways of searching for words before a given date, for example using Google Books and in Usenet. –  Hugo Oct 31 '11 at 10:50

"Truthiness" is something I make sure I understand when I'm picking up a new language, as they all deal with it differently. In my home-base first language of Perl, the string "0" is false. In many languages, that is a string that has content and is therefore true. In some languages the empty string "" is false, and in some it's true.

Understanding the choices that the language designers made about truthiness tells you a lot about their thinking, and starts to dip you into the conceptual universe of the language.

Whether we spelled it "truthiness" or used some other term (I think the header for that chapter in the Camel Book is "What Is Truth?"), programmers had a grip on varying values of the absolute thing called "true and false" long before Colbert came along and pointed out the bending of "true" in the public discourse.

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Truthiness is a legitimate and well defined term in Clojure, where it refers to the property of a value being considered true in a conditional statement.

So the conditional function below will only be called if value is "truthy"

  (if value

The only non-truthy values are false and nil, everything else is considered truthy.

I believe the philosophical justification for this is that nil can be taken to mean "does not exist", so the conditional statement is able to test for existence of a value.

Many other languages also have a similar concept of values that will be considered as true in a conditional context, so in conclusion I would argue that yes, truthiness should be regarded as a legitimate programming term when it is used in this way.

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I've written a system that would determine the (mathematical) chance of a boolean statement being true, given partial data. I.e. we could determine that there was a 73% chance of X being true, if we didn't have sufficient data yet to establish firmly that X was true. "Truthiness" would be a perfectly valid way to describe such a percentage belief in X.

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