To do something excessive to achieve a goal.
Used in a Sentence
overkill
Definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for overkill.
Editorial note
Also, Erlang's single-minded focus on keeping the application going may be a little overkill for compute.
Examples16
Definitions4
Parts of speech2
Quick take
To do something excessive to achieve a goal.
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of overkill gathered in one view.
(by extension) An unnecessary excess of whatever is needed to achieve a goal.
(literally, military) A destructive capacity that exceeds that needed to destroy an enemy; especially with nuclear weapons.
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for overkill.
verb
To do something excessive to achieve a goal.
noun
(by extension) An unnecessary excess of whatever is needed to achieve a goal.
noun
(literally, military) A destructive capacity that exceeds that needed to destroy an enemy; especially with nuclear weapons.
noun
(literally) Destruction beyond what is necessary to kill, especially in murder.
Example sentences
Also, Erlang's single-minded focus on keeping the application going may be a little overkill for compute.
It's overkill to disable or lobotomize the whole feature because of that one use case.
So it's overkill for one app, but good if you have several apps.
If what you're building is interactive documents, build tools are generally overkill.
It's maybe overkill to do it on the whole set instead of just a sample, probably the numbers would not change all that much.
Jira seems like overkill for anything but the biggest of projects.
Docker may be overkill for some of these, but it provides a simple way to launch a new task in a container with all dependencies installed.
But for most libraries it may really be overkill.
A long time ago I gave a horrendously overkill SO answer about it.
For gaming, this is the superlative of overkill.
It seems overkill and I can't think of many practical uses.
But we rely on other people's opinion precisely to avoid thinking hard about everything, which would be overkill at best, and could even kill you at worst.
Quote examples
Also worth noting that half of the book is about the "ubox" method for solving optimization problems - also cool, but may be overkill if you are just interested in the numeric format itself.
Much of this is overkill for "pages", but not for "apps".
Ultimately I'd say Cloud Foundry solves the problem but requires a lot of "support" VMs to make it work such that it might be overkill for your situation.
That's ~103 bits of entropy (massive overkill for most things), and yet is a whole lot easier to remember than, say, "FlyaJdqJW6kvyUQeE" - which is ~101 bits of entropy (17 random upper/lower/digit characters).
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use overkill in a sentence?
Also, Erlang's single-minded focus on keeping the application going may be a little overkill for compute.
What does overkill mean?
To do something excessive to achieve a goal.
What part of speech is overkill?
overkill is commonly used as verb, noun.