| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
| a chattering or flighty, light-headed person. |
| compact1 | |
| —adj | |
| 1. | closely packed together; dense |
| 2. | neatly fitted into a restricted space |
| 3. | concise; brief |
| 4. | well constructed; solid; firm |
| 5. | ( |
| 6. | denoting a tabloid-sized version of a newspaper that has traditionally been published in broadsheet form |
| 7. | logic (of a relation) having the property that for any pair of elements such that a is related to b, there is some element c such that a is related to c and c to b, as less than on the rational numbers |
| 8. | (US), (Canadian) (of a car) small and economical |
| —vb | |
| 9. | to pack or join closely together; compress; condense |
| 10. | ( |
| 11. | metallurgy to compress (a metal powder) to form a stable product suitable for sintering |
| —n | |
| 12. | a small flat case containing a mirror, face powder, etc, designed to be carried in a woman's handbag |
| 13. | (US), (Canadian) a comparatively small and economical car |
| 14. | metallurgy a mass of metal prepared for sintering by cold-pressing a metal powder |
| 15. | a tabloid-sized version of a newspaper that has traditionally been publis hed in broadsheet form |
| [C16: from Latin compactus, from compingere to put together, from com- together + pangere to fasten] | |
| com'pacter1 | |
| —n | |
| com'paction1 | |
| —n | |
| com'pactly1 | |
| —adv | |
| com'pactness1 | |
| —n | |
compact
adj. Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing created from the design can be used with greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact. Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through accreting features and cruft that don't merge cleanly into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of Classic C maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact).