downflex

downflex verb: to force downward without breaking.

Verb

downflex (third-person singular simple present downflexes, present participle downflexing, simple past and past participle downflexed)

(transitive) To force downward without breaking.
- Second, the unusually thick (2 to 5 km, Berry and Barr, 1971; Hall, 1973; Grantz et al., 1979) sediment cover in Canada Basin may serve to downflex the underlying oceanic crust and produce a greater than normal state of stress across the adjacent margin which is presently coupled to the seafloor...1982, R. A. Scrutton, Dynamics of Passive Margins, →ISBN, page 22
- Some of these sediments may act as locally uncompensated loads that generate the strong observed gravity highs, downflex the surrounding lithosphere to produce the broad flanking gravity lows, and contribute to the stress regime responsible for present offshore seismicity.1990, Arthur Grantz, Leonard Johnson, J. F. Sweeney, The Arctic Ocean region - Issue 1, page 235
(intransitive) To bend or stretch downward.
- The continent edge would downflex as the ocean floor is loaded by a continental-rise prism.1967, Institute for Oceanography, Collected Reprints-national Ocean Survey, page 305
- As along the eastern United States, continental shelves commonly acquire a prism of sediments as the continental margin downflexes.1974, Daniel N. Lapedes, McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of environmental science, page 114

downflex (plural downflexes)

Something that has been forced to curve downward.
- The southern end of the Rockies plunges gradually along its sharp frontal downflex and passes into the Anton Chico monocline.1972, Geological Society of America Bulletin - Volume 83, page 1850
- The axis of a topographic trench of Java-Sumatra type is thus displaced far seaward, about 200 km, from the position of the fundamental downflex in the subducting oceanic plate.1979, Warren Bell Hamilton, Tectonics of the Indonesian region, page 31
Something that can bend in a downward direction.
- Dinosaurs, as well as growing taller, developed a more pronounced downflex to lower their heads closer to the ground for better cropping techniques.1991, Antony Milne, The Fate of the Dinosaurs: New Perspectives in Evolution, page 90

downflex (not comparable)

Showing flexibility in a downward direction.
- There is no downward flexibility in expenditure and credit levels. But outputs and supplies are downflex.1974, Seshadriyengar Lakshmi Nara Simha, Inflation in India, page 77
- If the real wage rate is not downflex, the pace of adoption of technical change depends upon the elasticity in the savings supply schedule.1976, Vadilal Dagli, Financial Institutions of India, page 49

Verb
third-person singular present	downflexes
present participle	downflexing
past participle	downflexed
past	downflexed
Noun
plural	downflexes

From down- + flex.

What does downflex mean?: Downflex means to force downward without breaking.
What part of speech is downflex?: Downflex can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.
What is the past tense of downflex?: The past tense of downflex is downflexed.

Adapted from Wiktionary: downflex (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “downflex.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/downflex. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.