compression
NounOpen English WordNet
Noun (4)compressions
- an increase in the density of somethingSynonyms: compactionconcretiondensificationType of concentration
- the process or result of becoming smaller or pressed together“the contraction of a gas on cooling”Synonyms: condensationcontractionType of shrinking, shrinkageKinds constriction, coarctation
- encoding information while reducing the bandwidth or bits requiredOpposite decompressionType of encoding, encryptionKinds image compression, MPEG
- applying pressureSynonyms: compressingType of press, pressureKinds squeeze, constriction, condensing, crush
What does it mean? Question 1 of today’s quiz
Translations
Noun the act of compressing
- Spanish
- compresión
- French
- compression
- German
- Kompression
- Italian
- compressione
- Portuguese
- compressão
- Russian
- сжа́тие sžátije
- Japanese
- 圧縮 asshuku
- Dutch
- compressie
- Polish
- kompresja
- Greek
- συμπίεση sympíesi
4 more languages
- Portuguese (PT)
- compressão
- Catalan
- compressió
- Czech
- komprese
- Danish
- kompression
The main translation for each meaning, from the langtolang.com multilingual dictionary. Each word links to its full entry there.
Webster's Dictionary (1913)
Origin: L. compressio: cf. F. compression.
1. The act of compressing, or state of being compressed. “Compression of thought.” Dr. Samuel Johnson
2. Computers reduction of the space required for storage (of binary data) by an algorithm which converts the data to a smaller number of bits while preserving the information content. The act of compressing {3}. Compression may be lossless compression, in which all of the information in the original data is preserved, and the original data may be recovered in form identical to its original form; or lossy compression, in which some of the information in the original data is lost, and decompression results in a data form slightly different from the original. Lossy compression is used, for example, to compress audio or video recordings, and sometimes images, where the slight differences in the original data and the data recovered after lossy compression may be imperceptable to the human eye or ear. The JPEG format is produced by a lossy compression algorithm.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54 · with additions: GCIDE editors
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
1.<application> (Or "compaction") The coding of data to save storage space or transmission time. Although data is already coded in digital form for computer processing, it can often be coded more efficiently (using fewer bits). For example, run-length encoding replaces strings of repeated characters (or other units of data) with a single character and a count. There are many compression algorithms and utilities. Compressed data must be decompressed before it can be used.
The standard Unix compression utilty is called compress though GNU's superior gzip has largely replaced it. Other compression utilties include pack, zip and PKZIP.
When compressing several similar files, it is usually better to join the files together into an archive of some kind (using tar for example) and then compress them, rather than to join together individually compressed files. This is because some common compression algorithms build up tables based on the data from their current input which they have already compressed. They then use this table to compress subsequent data more efficiently.
See also TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, Lempel-Ziv Welch, "lossy", "lossless".
Compression FAQ (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/).
{Web Content Compression FAQ
(http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/compression/compression.html)}.
Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.compression, news:comp.compression.research.
2.<multimedia> Reducing the dynamic range of an audio signal, making quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Thus, when discussing digital audio, the preferred term for reducing the total amount of data is "compaction". Some advocate this term in all contexts.
(2004-04-26)