One alternative to psyllium husk in baking a number of possible choices or courses of action: There are plenty of alternatives to conventional advertising. A choice or course of action that is mutually exclusive with another: The alternative to staying in that dead-end job is to quit. A situation presenting a choice between two mutually exclusive possibilities: people facing the alternative of selling their homes or going bankrupt. Being one of a number of possible choices or courses of action: The highway is closed.

Being one of two mutually exclusive choices or courses of action: How effective is the alternative treatment? Substitute or other: Several members of the audience provided alternative views on the topic. Espousing or reflecting values that are different from those of the establishment or mainstream: an alternative newspaper. This reasoning is based on the word’s historical relation to Latin alter, “the other of two. Even in the 1960s, some 58 percent of the Usage Panel did not favor this edict, and now that majority is overwhelming. Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.