Compress

[verb kuh m-pres; noun kom-pres] /verb kəmˈprɛs; noun ˈkɒm prɛs/

verb (used with object)
1.
to press together; force into less space.
2.
to cause to become a solid mass:
to compress cotton into bales.
3.
to condense, shorten, or abbreviate:
The book was compressed by 50 pages.
4.
Computers. to reduce the storage space required for (data) by changing its format:
The algorithm should compress the video file without losing any quality.
noun
5.
Medicine/Medical. a soft, cloth pad held in place by a bandage and used to provide pressure or to supply moisture, cold, heat, or medication.
6.
an apparatus for compressing cotton bales.
7.
a warehouse for storing cotton bales before shipment.
verb (kəmˈprɛs)
1.
(transitive) to squeeze together or compact into less space; condense
2.
(computing) to apply a compression program to (electronic data) so that it takes up less space
noun (ˈkɒmprɛs)
3.
a wet or dry cloth or gauze pad with or without medication, applied firmly to some part of the body to relieve discomfort, reduce fever, drain a wound, etc
4.
a machine for packing material, esp cotton, under pressure
v.

late 14c., “to press (something) together,” from Old French compresser “compress, put under pressure,” from Latin compressare “to press together,” frequentative of comprimere “to squeeze,” from com- “together” (see com-) + premere “to press” (see press (v.1)). Related: Compressed; compressing.
n.

1590s in the surgical sense, from compress (v.).

compress com·press (kŏm’prěs’)
n.
A soft pad of gauze or other material applied with pressure to a part of the body to control hemorrhage or to supply heat, cold, moisture, or medication to alleviate pain or reduce infection. v. com·pressed, com·press·ing, com·press·es (kəm-prěs’)
To press or squeeze together.

1. To feed data through any compression algorithm.
2. The Unix program “compress”, now largely supplanted by gzip.
Unix compress was written in C by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods et al., and was widely circulated via Usenet. It uses the Lempel-Ziv Welch algorithm and normally produces files with the suffix “.Z”.
Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine-bit codes are output until they are all used. When this occurs, ten-bit codes are used and so on, until an implementation-dependent maximum is reached.
After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is checked. If it is decreasing then the entire string table is discarded and information is collected from scratch.