Stream

noun
1.
a body of water flowing in a channel or watercourse, as a river, rivulet, or brook.
Synonyms: rill, run, streamlet, runnel.
2.
a steady current in water, as in a river or the ocean: to row against the stream;
the Gulf Stream.
Synonyms: flow, tide.
3.
any flow of water or other liquid or fluid:
streams of blood.
4.
a current or flow of air, gas, or the like.
5.
a beam or trail of light:
A stream of moonlight fell from the clouds.
6.
a continuous flow or succession of anything:
a stream of words.
Synonyms: torrent, rush.
7.
prevailing direction; drift:
the stream of opinion.
8.
Digital Technology. a flow of data, as an audio broadcast, a movie, or live video, transmitted smoothly and continuously from a source to a computer, mobile device, etc.
verb (used without object)
9.
to flow, pass, or issue in a stream, as water, tears, or blood.
Synonyms: pour.
10.
to send forth or throw off a stream; run or flow (often followed by with):
eyes streaming with tears.
11.
to extend in a beam or in rays, as light:
Sunlight streamed in through the windows.
12.
to move or proceed continuously like a flowing stream, as a procession.
13.
to wave or float outward, as a flag in the wind.
14.
to hang in a loose, flowing manner, as long hair.
verb (used with object)
15.
to send forth or discharge in a stream:
The wound streamed blood.
16.
to cause to stream or float outward, as a flag.
17.
Digital Technology. to transfer or transmit (data) in such a way that it is processed in a steady and continuous stream:
Internet service providers are talking about setting limits on the amount of data that can be streamed into your home.
18.
Nautical. to place (an object) in the water at the end of a line attached to a vessel.
Idioms
19.
on stream, in or into operation:
The factory will be on stream in a month.
noun
1.
a small river; brook
2.
any steady flow of water or other fluid
3.
something that resembles a stream in moving continuously in a line or particular direction
4.
a rapid or unbroken flow of speech, etc: a stream of abuse
5.
a flow of money into a business: a revenue stream
6.
(Brit) any of several parallel classes of schoolchildren, or divisions of children within a class, grouped together because of similar ability
7.
go with the stream, drift with the stream, to conform to the accepted standards
8.
off stream, (of an industrial plant, manufacturing process, etc) shut down or not in production
9.
on stream

(of an industrial plant, manufacturing process, etc) in or about to go into operation or production
available or in existence

verb
10.
to emit or be emitted in a continuous flow: his nose streamed blood
11.
(intransitive) to move in unbroken succession, as a crowd of people, vehicles, etc
12.
(intransitive) to float freely or with a waving motion: bunting streamed in the wind
13.
(transitive) to unfurl (a flag, etc)
14.
(intransitive) to move causing a trail of light, condensed gas, etc, as a jet aircraft
15.
(mining) when intr, often foll by for. to wash (earth, gravel, etc) in running water in prospecting (for gold, etc), to expose the particles of ore or metal
16.
(Brit, education) to group or divide (children) in streams
stream
(strēm)

A flow of water in a channel or bed, as a brook, rivulet, or small river.

A flow of a watery substance, such as blood in blood vessels or cytoplasm in fungal hyphae, in an organism or in part of an organism.

[“STREAM: A Scheme Language for Formally Describing Digital Circuits”, C.D. Kloos in PARLE: Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, LNCS 259, Springer 1987].
(1995-01-30)

1. An abstraction referring to any flow of data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or receiver, consumer). A stream usually flows through a channel of some kind, as opposed to packets which may be addressed and routed independently, possibly to multiple recipients. Streams usually require some mechanism for establishing a channel or a “connection” between the sender and receiver.
2. In the C language’s buffered input/ouput library functions, a stream is associated with a file or device which has been opened using fopen. Characters may be read from (written to) a stream without knowing their actual source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently by the library routines.
3. Confusingly, Sun have called their modular device driver mechanism “STREAMS”.
4. In IBM’s AIX operating system, a stream is a full-duplex processing and data transfer path between a driver in kernel space and a process in user space.
[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03].
5. streaming.
6. lazy list.
(1996-11-06)