verb, -flat⋅ed, -flat⋅ing.| 1. | to release the air or gas from (something inflated, as a balloon): They deflated the tires slightly to allow the truck to drive under the overpass. |
| 2. | to depress or reduce (a person or a person's ego, hopes, spirits, etc.); puncture; dash: Her rebuff thoroughly deflated me. |
| 3. | to reduce (currency, prices, etc.) from an inflated condition; to affect with deflation. |
| 4. | to become deflated. |
deflate file format, compression
A compression standard derived from LZ77; it is reportedly used in zip, gzip, PKZIP, and png, among others.
Unlike LZW, deflate compression does not use patented compression algorithms.
Used as a verb to mean to compress (not decompress!) a file which has been compressed using deflate compression. The opposite, inflate, means to decompress data which has been deflated.
Deflate is described in RFC 1951.
(1997-06-21)