Offbysome

Offbysome is a neologism used in informal technical writing to describe a class of deviations where a value differs from a target by an amount that is uncertain but bounded within a range. The term has no formal standardization and is most often encountered in online forums, code reviews, and exploratory data-analysis notes.

Etymology and usage: The phrase combines off by with some to signal an indeterminate offset rather than a fixed step. In practice, offbysome conveys that the exact offset is not known a priori but can be constrained, such as within a tolerance that depends on context.

Distinctions: It is distinct from off-by-one, which refers to a specific single-step error, and from general error bounds, which may specify a precise bound rather than an element of uncertainty.

Examples: In a scheduling scenario, arrival times may be offbysome by 5 to 15 minutes due to variable traffic. In numerical approximation, a computed value may be offbysome of the true value with a bound that changes with input size.

See also: Off-by-one error; tolerance; error bound; numerical approximation. While not widely formalized, the term is used to express a flexible notion of deviation where the exact offset is unknown but constrained by context.