häviöttömän

Häviöttömän is a Finnish adjective meaning lossless, describing a state or process in which no information is lost compared to the original. The term is widely used in information technology, digital media, and data storage to distinguish from methods that discard data to save space or bandwidth.

Common usage covers data compression, encoding, and storage. Phrases such as häviöttömän pakkaus (lossless compression), häviöttömän tiedon säilymisen tarkoittama tallennus (lossless data retention), or häviöttömän kuvan ja äänen formaatti appear in technical contexts. In practice, formats like WAV and FLAC are referred to as lossless in Finnish, whereas formats such as MP3 or JPEG are described as lossy (häviöllinen).

In Finnish, häviötön is the base adjective, and häviöttömän can occur as an inflected form used before nouns in different grammatical cases. The concept is anchored in information theory, where lossless processing preserves the original information without permanent alteration. The opposite of häviöttömän is häviöllinen, used for processes or formats that sacrifice some data to reduce size or resource use.

The term is also used more broadly to describe preserving quality or content in non-technical contexts, though its primary association remains with data integrity and fidelity. See also lossless compression and lossy compression for related concepts, and the Finnish terms häviöllinen and pakkaus as linguistic and practical counterparts.