fabless
adjective
fabless is an adjective meaning “Of a company: that does not make its own silicon wafers, and primarily concerns itself with research and design” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-A-B-L-E-S-S, and it appears about once in every 29 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does fabless mean?
adjective
- 1
Of a company: that does not make its own silicon wafers, and primarily concerns itself with research and design.
The fabless semiconductor company recently finished designing its new line of microchips.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is fabless?
Fabless appears about once in every 29 million words in written English, the 163,711th 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).
Where does fabless come from?
fabrication and -less.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).