| 1. | to make flat. |
| 2. | to knock down: The boxer flattened his opponent in the second round. |
| 3. | to become flat. |
| 4. | flatten in, Nautical. flat 1 (def. 61). |
| 5. | flatten out, Aeronautics. to fly into a horizontal position, as after a dive. |
flatten
|
flatten
To remove structural information, especially to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to flat ASCII. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent canonical form."
[The Jargon File]