Word.ws English Dictionary

flattened the curve

flattened the curve is the simple past of flatten the curve.

Meaning of flatten the curve

Verb

flatten the curve (third-person singular simple present flattens the curve, present participle flattening the curve, simple past and past participle flattened the curve)

  1. (colloquial) To reduce the rate at which an infection spreads during an epidemic, decreasing the number of active cases at any given time by increasing the period of time over which numbers of similar cases occur.
    • It is possible that these measures could have started to flatten the curve of deaths before the effects of the wider lockdown were visible.2020 April 6, Robert Cuffe, Christine Jeavans, “Coronavirus: When will we know if the UK lockdown is working?”, in BBC News

Questions about flattened the curve

What is flattened the curve the simple past of?
Flattened the curve is the simple past of flatten the curve.

Words near flattened the curve in the dictionary

  1. flattened
  2. flattened devicetree
  3. flattened down
  4. flattened out
  5. flattened rice
  6. flattened the curve
  7. flattener
  8. flatteners
  9. flattening
  10. flattening down
  11. flattening out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flattened the curve (page history and authors); flatten the curve (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.

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