Kaotusteta

Kaotusteta is an Estonian adjective meaning "lossless" or "without loss." It is used to describe data representations, encoding, or processes in which no information is discarded during compression, storage, processing, or transmission. The term is common in information technology and digital media, and it is contrasted with concepts described as lossy.

In technical contexts, kaotusteta tihend refers to lossless compression algorithms that guarantee exact reconstruction of the original data after decompression. Examples of lossless formats or methods include FLAC for audio, PNG for images, and WAV or lossless codecs for video and audio. By contrast, lossy methods, which discard some information to reduce size, are described using terms like kaotusega or kaotustaga. The literal sense of kaotusteta is "without loss," emphasizing data integrity and reversibility.

Etymology and usage: kaotusteta derives from kaotus (loss) with a suffix that forms adjectives meaning "without" or "free of." The term is widely used in Estonian technical language and can apply to formats, codecs, and processing workflows where lossless preservation is required or desired. In everyday language, it may also be used more loosely to indicate any approach that avoids data loss or preserves the full information content.

See also: lossless, lossy, data compression, PNG, FLAC, WAV.