Tidy

Tid y is an English adjective and adverb related to order, cleanliness, and neat arrangement. As an adjective, it describes something that is well organized, free of clutter, or properly arranged, such as a tidy desk or a tidy kitchen. As an adverb, tidily describes doing something in a neat and orderly manner. The noun forms tidiness or a tidy (informally) are used to refer to the state of being tidy or to a tidy amount in some contexts. The word also appears in phrases that emphasize adequacy or sufficiency, such as having a tidy sum of money.

In everyday language, tidy can be applied to physical spaces, clothing, and even procedures or documents that are clear and orderly. It is common to hear requests like “Please keep your workspace tidy” or descriptions like “a tidy file cabinet.” The term supports both literal cleanliness and metaphorical order, such as tidy writing or tidy data, where the emphasis is on clarity and structure.

Specialized uses include the concept of tidy data in data science, promoted by Hadley Wickham. Tidy data uses a standard structure: each variable forms a column, each observation forms a row, and each type of observational unit forms a table. This convention facilitates data manipulation and analysis, particularly within the tidyverse ecosystem in the R programming language.

See also: tidiness, tidy up, tidy data, tidyverse.