Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
That doesn't cause undue damage, in the event of failure. n. A fail-safe device or mechanism. v
To compensate automatically, in the event of a failure.
WordNet
adj. guaranteed not to fail; "a fail-safe recipe for cheese souffle"
eliminating danger by compensating automatically for a failure or malfunction; "a fail-safe device in a nuclear weapon to deactivate it automatically in the event of accident"
Wikipedia
A fail-safe is a device or practice that, in the event of a specific type of failure, responds or results in a way that will cause no harm, or at least minimizes harm, to other devices or to personnel.
Fail-safe and fail-secure are similar but distinct concepts. Fail-safe means that a device will not endanger lives or property when it fails. Fail-secure means that access or data will not fall into the wrong hands in a failure. Sometimes the approaches suggest opposite solutions. For example, if a building catches fire, fail-safe systems would unlock doors to ensure quick escape and allow firefighters inside, while fail-secure would lock doors to prevent unauthorized access to the building.
A system's being "fail-safe" means not that failure is impossible or improbable, but rather that the system's design prevents or mitigates unsafe consequences of the system's failure. That is, if and when a "fail-safe" system "fails", it is "safe" or at least no less safe than when it was operating correctly.
Since many types of failure are possible, it must be specified to what failure a component is fail safe. For example, a system may be fail-safe in the event of a power outage (electrical failure), but may not be fail safe in the event of mechanical failures.
Fail-Safe is a bestselling American novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The story was initially serialized in three installments in the Saturday Evening Post, on October 13, 20, and 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The novel was released in late October 1962, and was then adapted into a 1964 film of the same name directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, Dan O'Herlihy, and Walter Matthau. In 2000, the novel was adapted again for a televised play, broadcast live in black and white on CBS. All three works have the same theme, accidental nuclear war, with the same plot.
Fail-Safe was so similar to an earlier novel, Red Alert, that Red Alerts author, Peter George, sued on a charge of plagiarism, settling out of court.
A fail-safe describes a device which, if or when it fails, will cause a minimum of harm.
Fail-safe may also refer to:
- Fail-Safe Investing a personal finance book by Harry Browne
-
Fail-Safe (novel), a 1962 novel about an accidental sortie of American nuclear bombers against the USSR
- Fail Safe (1964 film), a 1964 film, based on the novel, directed by Sidney Lumet
- Fail Safe (2000 film), a 2000 made-for-television drama, based on the novel, starring George Clooney
- "Fail Safe" (Stargate SG-1), an episode of the science fiction television series
- Failsafe (UK band), a Preston-based punk rock band
- Failsafe (US band), a Kansas City-based mainstream rock band
- "Failsafe", a song first recorded by The Choir Practice and that appeared on the New Pornographers album " Challengers"
Usage examples of "fail-safe".
There are so many backups to the backups to the fail-safe systems and procedures that it always takes not just one but an unusual chain of strange events to bring one down.
Her second thought was somewhat more practical, although no more correct: namely, that the Enterprise life-support system had some sort of fail-safe to negate gravity upon detecting a falling body.
The fail-safes had protected the array itself, but the spike had bled back through the data transmission chain and burned out the primary data coupling from Gravitic Two.
Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler- which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had.
Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler - which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had been pulled out to place the widget abaft the bulkhead and weld it to the shell.
Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler -- which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had been pulled out to place the widget abaft the bulkhead and weld it to the shell.
Just as a fail-safe, I think we should ask Uncle Hafiz to send us down some personnel locators that my human friends use in times like these the tiny ones that send out constant signals.
Planetary life was inherently fail-safe: big, comforting biospheres could recover from those little course-corrections that triggered mass extinctions.
Is it the fact that at Geneva he maintains--owns and operates--an electronic contraption, a fail-safe gimcrack which, in a crisis, pre-empts Holt and Harenzany in their management of the totality of the world's leadies?
Fail-safe programming sent quavers through his biomechanical nervous system, telling him that what he was doing he must not do.
There were two separate braking systems on the cars, each with its own fail-safe mode.
We've got to cut the ground That will short out the circuit into its fail-safe mode without tripping the field.
In addition, they are doubtless equipped with any number of fail-safe and backup systems designed to deal with the first sign of structural failure.