flag

From Wiktionary

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[change] Pronunciation

• IPA: /flæg/
•  Audio (US)^{help, file}

[change] Noun

Singular flag

Plural flags

1. A piece of cloth, frequently marked with a colourful symbol or sign.
2. A flag flown by a ship to show the presence on board of the admiral (the leader of a group of ships); the admiral himself; or his flagship.
3. The use of a flag, especially to show the start of a race or other event.

   Be ready to start running immediately at the flag.

4. On a computer, a variable or place in the computer's memory that keeps a true-or-false, yes-or-no value, usually either recording the fact that a certain event has happened or asking for a certain action to happen if it's an action that doesn't always happen.
5. In a command line interface (a place on a computer screen for people to type commands for a computer to do), a sign telling the computer to do something it does only sometimes, or a sign changing in some other way the action of the command being typed.

[change] Verb

Plain form flag

Third-person singular flags

Past tense flagged

Past participle flagged

Present participle flagging

1. To mark with a flag, especially to show the importance of something
2. (often with down) To signal to, especially to stop a car that's driving past, etc.
   • Please flag a taxi down for me.
3. When a person flags, the person becomes weak, tired or feeble.
   • His strength flagged toward the end of the race.
4. To signal or mark something that happened.
   • The compiler flagged three errors.
5. To set the value of a variable in a computer program to true.
   • Flag the debug option before running the program.

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