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entailment

/ɛnˈteɪl.mənt/noun

entailment is a noun meaning “The act of logically entailing, the state of being entailed, or something that is entailed” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled E-N-T-A-I-L-M-E-N-T, and it appears about once in every 21 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of entailment is entailments.

What does entailment mean?

noun

  1. 1

    The act of logically entailing, the state of being entailed, or something that is entailed.

    Entailment does not imply causation: if a set of premisses entail a conclusion, that does not mean (necessarily) that they cause that conclusion to be true.

  2. 2

    The act of setting up an entail to restrict inheritance.

  3. 3

    nonstandardAn entail.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce entailment?

  • /ɛnˈteɪl.mənt/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Wodencafe-entailment.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of entailment

  • entailments plural
  • intailment

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is entailment?

Entailment appears about once in every 21 million words in written English, the 138,319th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Entailment in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense state of being entailed:

LanguageWords
Frenchimplication
GermanBedingtheit, Erfordernis, Implikation

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does entailment come from?

From entail + -ment.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).