The story
Latin roots, Latin nullus (“not any”) + potent (“having power”) – literally, “having no power”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
nullipotent
Today it means: Describing an action which has no side effect. Queries are typically nullipotent: they return useful data, but do not change the data structure queried. Contrast with idempotent. Full definition →