nadpisanie

Nadpisanie is a Polish noun formed from the verb nadpisywać (to write over, to overwrite). In general usage, nadpisanie refers to the act of writing new data on top of existing data, thereby replacing it. This term is most common in information technology, computing and data storage contexts, where nadpisanie can refer to overwriting a file, overwriting memory, or rewriting parts of a data structure. Depending on the context, nadpisanie may be intentional—such as updating a file with new content—or accidental, causing data loss if the original content cannot be recovered. In digital storage and memory management, nadpisanie is contrasted with operations like truncation or appending, which do not replace the entire existing content.

Outside IT, nadpisanie is less standardized but may appear in editorial or document-editing contexts to denote adding or changing a heading or title on a page, though more common terms in Polish for this sense are nagłówek or tytuł. Etymology: from na- (on/upon) + pisać (to write) and the iterative aspect of the verb nadpisywać.

In practice, the meaning of nadpisanie is largely determined by context; in IT it signals irreversible or hard-to-recover replacement of data, while in editing it would indicate the act of adding a heading to a document. Safety and data integrity considerations emphasize backups and versioning to mitigate unintended nadpisanie.