Zoned

Zoned is the past participle of the verb zone and is used as an adjective to describe something that is divided into zones or designated for particular uses. The term originated with the concept of establishing zones within a larger area, and it remains common in discussions of regulation, planning, and organization. A plain description would note that something is zoned when an authority has assigned it to a specific category or set of rules.

In urban planning and land use, a place is described as zoned when a jurisdiction has designated parcels or districts for particular uses, such as residential, commercial, industrial, or agricultural. Zoning decisions help guide development, density, building types, and permitted activities, and changes typically require a formal rezoning process or amendments to zoning maps and codes.

In storage technology, zoned storage refers to architectures that partition media into zones with distinct rules for writing and erasing. Zones are written sequentially, and data access patterns may be constrained by zone boundaries. This model underpins Shingled Magnetic Recording drives and NVMe Zoned Namespace (ZNS), which aim to improve density and performance by aligning operations with the physical characteristics of the storage medium.

In computing, zoned decimal is a numeric representation used in IBM mainframe and some COBOL-era systems, where each digit is stored with a zone value in the high-order bits of a byte. This encoding supports decimal arithmetic and sign indication in legacy software.

Overall, zoned is a versatile term used across planning, data storage, and computing to describe partitioning or designation into zones. See also zoning, zoning ordinance, zoned storage, and ZNS.