parsimony

noun

Etymology: From Middle English parcimonie, from Middle French parsimonie, from Latin parsimōnia (“frugality, sparingness”), from pars-, past participle stem of parcere (“to spare”), + -monia, suffix signifying action, state, or condition.

1. Great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily.

   “Near-synonyms: (usually admirable) frugality, economy, thrift, thriftiness; (excessive degree) tightness, stinginess; (extreme degree) miserliness; see also Thesaurus:frugal, Thesaurus:stingy”

   “Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital. Industry, indeed, provides the subject which parsimony accumulates. But whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not save and store up, the capital would never be the greater.”

2. The quality or characteristic of using the fewest resources or explanations to solve a problem.

   “We used three search heuristics, Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and maximum parsimony, to construct phylogenies from unique COI haplotypes and used default parameters for analyses unless otherwise noted.”