| 1. | a blush; rosy glow: a flush of embarrassment on his face. |
| 2. | a rushing or overspreading flow, as of water. |
| 3. | a sudden rise of emotion or excitement: a flush of anger. |
| 4. | glowing freshness or vigor: the flush of youth. |
| 5. | hot flush. hot flash. |
| 6. | a cleansing preparation that acts by flushing: an oil flush for the car's engine. |
| 7. | to redden; cause to blush or glow: Winter air flushed the children's cheeks. |
| 8. | to flood or spray thoroughly with water, as for cleansing purposes: They flushed the wall with water and then scrubbed it down. |
| 9. | to wash out (a sewer, toilet, etc.) by a sudden rush of water. |
| 10. | Metallurgy.
|
| 11. | to animate or excite; inflame: flushed with success. |
| 12. | to blush; redden. |
| 13. | to flow with a rush; flow and spread suddenly. |
| 14. | to operate by flushing; undergo flushing: The toilet won't flush. |
| 1. | even or level, as with a surface; forming the same plane: The bottom of the window is flush with the floor. |
| 2. | having direct contact; being right next to; immediately adjacent; contiguous: The table was flush against the wall. |
| 3. | well-supplied, as with money; affluent; prosperous: He was feeling flush on payday. |
| 4. | abundant or plentiful, as money. |
| 5. | having a ruddy or reddish color; blushing. |
| 6. | full of vigor; lusty. |
| 7. | full to overflowing. |
| 8. | Printing. even or level with the right margin (flush right) or the left margin (flush left) of the type page; without an indention. |
| 9. | on the same level; in a straight line; without a change of plane: to be made flush with the top of the table. |
| 10. | in direct contact; squarely: It was set flush against the edge. |
| 11. | to make flush or even. |
| 12. | to improve the nutrition of (a ewe) to bring on optimum physiological conditions for breeding. |
| 13. | to send out shoots, as plants in spring. |
| 14. | a fresh growth, as of shoots and leaves. |
Hunting.| 1. | to rouse and cause to start up or fly off: to flush a woodcock. |
| 2. | to fly out or start up suddenly. |
| 3. | a flushed bird or flock of birds. |

Cards.| 1. | consisting entirely of cards of one suit: a flush hand. |
| 2. | a hand or set of cards all of one suit. Compare royal flush, straight flush. |
| 3. | Pinochle. a meld of ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of the trump suit. Compare marriage (def. 8), royal marriage. |

flush 1 (flŭsh) v. flushed, flush·ing, flush·es v. intr.
[Probably from flush3, to dart out.] flush'er n., flush'ness n. |
flush
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flush 1 (flŭsh)
v. flushed, flush·ing, flush·es
To turn red, as from fever, heat, or strong emotion; blush.
To clean, rinse, or empty with a rapid flow of a liquid, especially water.
An act of cleansing or rinsing with a flow of water.
A reddening of the skin, as with fever, emotion, or exertion.
A brief sensation of heat over all or part of the body.
flush data
To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation.
"Flush" was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation. One spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before they could be printed.
Compare drain.
2. To force temporarily buffered data to be written to more permanent memory. E.g. flushing buffered disk writes to disk, as with C's standard I/O library "fflush(3)" call. This sense was in use among BLISS programmers at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965. Another example of this usage is flushing a cache on a context switch where modified data stored in the cace which belongs to one processes must be written out to main memory so that the cache can be used by another process.
[The Jargon File]
(2005-07-18)