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English

Formed in Modern English as capable +‎ -ity.

capability (countable and uncountable, plural capabilities)

The power or ability to generate an outcome.
- 2024 October 5, Jessie Yeung, “Hong Kong plans to install thousands of surveillance cameras. Critics say it’s more proof the city is moving closer to China”, in CNN‎^[1], Atlanta, Ga.: Warner Bros. Discovery, archived from the original on 2 March 2026:
  And that sight will become more common in the coming years, as the city’s police pursue an ambitious campaign to install thousands of cameras to elevate their surveillance capabilities.
(computing) A digital token allowing a user or process to interact in a specified way with an object that is subject to access control. [from 1960s]
A file descriptor can be considered a capability that can only be leveraged using the appropriate system calls, passing it as an argument.
- 1987 November, Richard Y. Kain, Carl E. Landwehr, “On Access Checking in Capability-Based Systems”, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering‎^[2], volume SE-13, number 2, archived from the original on 3 May 2019, pages 202–207:
  Enforcing a security policy means controlling the rights users can acquire to data. In a capability machine, a user’s rights are defined by the capabilities he (or a process acting on his behalf) can obtain and the access rights conferred by those capabilities.

the power or ability to generate an outcome — see also capacity

in computing

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