Word.ws English Dictionary

flattening the curve

flattening the curve is the present participle and gerund 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 flattening the curve

What is flattening the curve the present participle and gerund of?
Flattening the curve is the present participle and gerund of flatten the curve.

Words near flattening the curve in the dictionary

  1. flattener
  2. flatteners
  3. flattening
  4. flattening down
  5. flattening out
  6. flattening the curve
  7. flattenings
  8. flattens
  9. flattens down
  10. flattens out
  11. flattens the curve

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flattening 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: “flattening the curve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flattening_the_curve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.