Word.ws English Dictionary

SWF

/ˈswɪf/

SWF noun: a file encoded in the defunct Adobe Flash file format SWF. Also the initialism of single white female.

Noun

SWF (plural SWFs)

  1. A file encoded in the defunct Adobe Flash file format SWF.
    • On the Web, linking to a SWF directly is not a very attractive option. You can’t control the content around the SWF or the title of the page in the browser title area. It’s also difficult to add content that’s friendly to search engines, and it’s impossible to detect a Flash version or provide...2008, Chris Allen, Wade Arnold, Aral Balkan, Nicolas Cannasse, John Grden, Moses Gunesch, Marc Hughes, R. Jon MacDonald, Andy Zupko, The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development, Berkeley...
    • A SWF file, or simply “a SWF,” is an efficient, compressed binary file that can contain graphics, animation, text, bitmaps, sounds, video, and even arbitrary data. […] When compiling AIR apps, an .air file is generated, but even this is a package that contains SWFs for its executable ActionScript...2010, Roger Braunstein, ActionScript® 3.0 Bible, 2nd edition, Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley Publishing, Inc., →ISBN, page 8

Also used as

SWF is also the initialism of single white female.

SWF is also the initialism of sovereign wealth fund.

SWF is also the initialism of Spring Web Flow.

SWF is also the initialism of Shockwave Flash.

Examples of SWF in a sentence

  • On the Web, linking to a SWF directly is not a very attractive option.2008, Chris Allen, Wade Arnold, Aral Balkan, Nicolas Cannasse, John Grden, Moses Gunesch, Marc Hughes, R. Jon MacDonald, Andy Zupko, The...
  • When you run a SWF using Flash Player on your desktop, it loads and runs the SWF.2010 December, Michael James Williams, “Introduction”, in Facebook Graph API Development with Flash, Birmingham: Packt Publishing Ltd...

Forms of SWF

pluralSWFs

Origin of SWF

(file format): SWF originated as an abbreviation for Shockwave Flash. This usage was changed to the backronym Small Web Format to eliminate confusion with a different technology, Shockwave, from which SWF derived. There is no official resolution to the initialism SWF by Adobe.

Questions about SWF

What does SWF mean?
SWF means a file encoded in the defunct Adobe Flash file format SWF.
How do you use SWF in a sentence?
On the Web, linking to a SWF directly is not a very attractive option.
What part of speech is SWF?
SWF is a noun.
How do you pronounce SWF?
SWF is pronounced /ˈswɪf/.
What is the plural of SWF?
The plural of SWF is SWFs.

Words near SWF in the dictionary

  1. swevens
  2. Swexit
  3. Sweyn
  4. Swezey
  5. Swezeys
  6. SWF
  7. SWFC
  8. SWFs
  9. SWG
  10. swh
  11. Swiantek

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: SWF (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:

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