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I'm going to conduct an experiment. Before it I have a bunch of events which I expect to happen. I call them "expected events".

After the experiment was run, I have two kind of events: "expected" ones (those which happened while I waited for them) and "unexpected" (which happened but I didn't expect it).

There are two entities denoted by "expected events": those which I was expecting to happen in the future and those which have already happened and met my expectations. How could I deal with this naming clash?

[The question arose while I was writing a program, so it is more about naming entities in programming, but I think it is self-contained enough to be here.]

UPD: the name will be used in a program, so it should be short, not more than 2-3 words for entity.

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  • you can use a synonym of expected such as anticipated event or awaited event to differentiate them. Or change event for results. Event carries a connotation of something in the future, even though it's been used since also for past things ( it meant "something to come"). So expected events for phase 1 and expected/unexpected results after the experiment is ov er.
    – P. O.
    Commented Jul 22, 2016 at 0:45
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    I would use "expected" for future events and "realized" for those which were both expected previously and turned out as you expected they would.
    – A.Ellett
    Commented Jul 22, 2016 at 2:09
  • @A.Ellett I like "realized" most, thank you.
    – Ivan Smirnov
    Commented Jul 22, 2016 at 12:53

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For programming I would change it to "expected" (future) and "predicted" and "unexpected" (past).

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  • Thanks, looks good enough. I'll accept the answer after waiting for other answers for a while.
    – Ivan Smirnov
    Commented Jul 22, 2016 at 0:38

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