Occam's razor

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the methodological principle that among competing explanations that equally account for the observations, the one invoking the fewest entities, assumptions, or causes is to be preferred; attributed to the fourteenth-century English friar and philosopher William of Ockham who formulated entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem; widely applied in science, statistics, and philosophy as a heuristic for model selection, though its epistemic justification and limits remain debated