From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Utility \U*til"i*ty\, n. [OE. utilite, F. utilit['e], L.
utilitas, fr. utilis useful. See Utile.]
[1913 Webster]
1. The quality or state of being useful; usefulness;
production of good; profitableness to some valuable end;
as, the utility of manure upon land; the utility of the
sciences; the utility of medicines.
[1913 Webster]
The utility of the enterprises was, however, so
great and obvious that all opposition proved
useless. --Macaulay.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Polit. Econ.) Adaptation to satisfy the desires or wants;
intrinsic value. See Note under Value, 2.
[1913 Webster]
Value in use is utility, and nothing else, and in
political economy should be called by that name and
no other. --F. A.
Walker.
[1913 Webster]
3. Happiness; the greatest good, or happiness, of the
greatest number, -- the foundation of utilitarianism. --J.
S. Mill.
[1913 Webster]
Syn: Usefulness; advantageous; benefit; profit; avail;
service.
Usage: Utility, Usefulness. Usefulness has an Anglo-Saxon
prefix, utility is Latin; and hence the former is used
chiefly of things in the concrete, while the latter is
employed more in a general and abstract sense. Thus,
we speak of the utility of an invention, and the
usefulness of the thing invented; of the utility of an
institution, and the usefulness of an individual. So
beauty and utility (not usefulness) are brought into
comparison. Still, the words are often used
interchangeably.
[1913 Webster]
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
utility
adj 1: used of beef; usable but inferior [syn: {utility(a)},
utility-grade]
2: capable of substituting in any of several positions on a
team; "a utility infielder" [syn: {utility(a)},
{substitute(a)}]
n 1: a company that performs a public service; subject to
government regulation [syn: utility, public utility,
public utility company, public-service corporation]
2: the quality of being of practical use [syn: utility,
usefulness] [ant: inutility, unusefulness,
uselessness]
3: the service (electric power or water or transportation)
provided by a public utility; "the cost of utilities never
decreases"; "all the utilities were lost after the hurricane"
4: (economics) a measure that is to be maximized in any
situation involving choice
5: (computer science) a program designed for general support of
the processes of a computer; "a computer system provides
utility programs to perform the tasks needed by most users"
[syn: utility program, utility, service program]
6: a facility composed of one or more pieces of equipment
connected to or part of a structure and designed to provide a
service such as heat or electricity or water or sewage
disposal; "the price of the house included all utilities"
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008) [foldoc]:
utility software
utility
utility program
<tool> (Or utility program, tool) Any software that performs
some specific task that is secondary to the main purpose of
using the computer (the latter would be called {application
programs}) but is not essential to the operation of the
computer (system software).
Many utilities could be considered as part of the {system
software}, which can in turn be considered part of the
operating system.
The following are some broad categories of utility software,
specific types and examples.
* Disks
disk formatter: FDISK, format
defragmenter
disk checker: fsck
disk cleaner
system profiler
backup
file system compression
* Files and directories
list directory: ls, dir
copy, move, remove: cp, mv, rm, xcopy
archive: tar
compression: zip
format conversion: atob
comparison: diff
sort: sort
* Security
authentication: login
antivirus software: avast, Norton Antivirus
firewall: Zone Alarm, Windows firewall
encryption: gpg)
* Editors for general-purpose formats (as opposed to specific
formats like a word processing document)
text editor: Emacs
binary editor, hex editor
* Communications
mail transfer agent: sendmail
e-mail notification: biff
file transfer: ftp, rcp, Firefox
file synchronisation: unison, briefcase
chat: Gaim, cu
directory services: bind, nslookup, whois
network diagnosis: ping, traceroute
remote access: rlogin, ssh
* Software development
compiler: gcc
build: make, ant
codewalker
preprocessor: cpp
debugger: adb, gdb
installation: apt-get, msiexec, patch
compiler compiler: yacc
* Hardware
device configuration: PCU, devman, stty
(2007-02-02)