bistability

This term is primarily used in technical fields such as electronics, physics, and biology to describe a system that can exist in one of two stable states. It implies a threshold effect where a specific amount of energy or a trigger is required to flip the system from one state to the other, after which it remains in that new state even if the trigger is removed.

In a pragmatic sense, the word is highly formal and specialized. It is rarely used in casual conversation and is almost exclusively found in scientific literature or engineering specifications to describe memory elements, like flip-flops in digital circuits, or biological switches in genetic regulation.