spillover

See also: spill over

English

Etymology

From spill +‎ over.

Noun

spillover (countable and uncountable, plural spillovers)

1. That which overflows; the excess or side effect.

   The spillover from the dam due to the heavy rains will run down this channel and harmlessly dump into that river, we hope.

   The spillover from this war will be many little massacres of civilians by civilians.

   • 1976 April 3, David Brill, “Twelve Carter - 17 years for and by gays”, in Gay Community News, page 13:

     The pool table is a sort of spill-over from Upstairs, the suspiciously-named Ramrod Room, which operates almost as a separate bar.

   • 2023 November 6, Matt Reynolds, “The World's Broken Food System Costs $12.7 Trillion a Year”, in Wired‎^[1]:

     This could mean European countries need to import more food from countries like Brazil, which would incentivize deforestation and add up to more environmental hidden costs there.
     Such cross-border spillover is one reason Bobo isn’t a big fan of the true-cost accounting approach the FAO used to come up with its hidden cost figures.

2. (epidemiology) The spread of infectious disease between different species of animal and particularly to humans.
   • 2020 March 12, Kevin Berger, “The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming”, in Nautilus‎^[2], archived from the original on 15 March 2020:

     We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover.

Derived terms

• spillover effect

See also

• zoonosis

Anagrams

• overspill

Italian

Etymology

Borrowed from English spillover.

Noun

spillover m (invariable)

1. (neologism, epidemiology) spillover