parsimony

Etymology

From Middle English parcimonie, from Middle French parsimonie, from Latin parsimōnia (“frugality, sparingness”), from pars-, past participle stem of parcere (“to spare”), + -monia, suffix signifying action, state, or condition.

noun

1. Great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily.
   Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital. Industry, indeed, provides the subject which parsimony accumulates. But whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not save and store up, the capital would never be the greater. 1776, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
   THE WATERFORD & TRAMORE RAILWAY. By H. Fayle and A. T. Newham. David & Charles. 12s 6d. … Parsimony was responsible for low wages: at the turn of the century the Secretary & Manager was receiving £175 a year and the Locomotive Superintendent slightly less. 1964 October, “New Books”, in Modern Railways, page 296
2. (by extension) The quality or characteristic of using the fewest resources or explanations to solve a problem.
   We used three search heuristics, Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and maximum parsimony, to construct phylogenies from unique COI haplotypes and used default parameters for analyses unless otherwise noted. February 15, 2019, Boyd A. Mori et al., “A new species of Contarinia Rondani (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) that induces flower galls on canola (Brassicaceae) in the Canadian prairies”, in Canadian Entomologist, volume 151, →DOI, pages 131–148