English

Verb

minify ‎(third-person singular simple present minifies, present participle minifying, simple past and past participle minified)

1. To make smaller.
   • 1887, Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Volume 4: Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists, "Bibliography: Modern Works"

     Schneckenburger strives to make it appear that Baur unduly minifies the Christian element in Manichæism.

   • 1942, Lloyd C. Douglas, Green Light, Pocket Books Inc., page 170:

     There must be something in the appeal of the Gothic that minifies one group of values leaving other considerations untouched, or actually magnifying them.

2. To reduce in apparent size, as for example objects viewed through a lens or mirror shaped so as to increase the field of view, such as a convex or aspheric mirror or a Fresnel lens
   • 1935, Lloyd C. Douglas, Green Light, Houghton Mifflin, Chapter 10:

     But, mused Parker, this theory of one's perplexities being diminished by the vastly superior height of these Gothic arches cannot have any foundation in fact, for the same inverted telescope that minifies my burdens also minifies my capacity to carry them, leaving me exactly of the same stature as before.

3. (computing) To remove white space and unnecessary characters from a web page's source code in order to reduce its size and improve download time.
   • 2008, Steve Souders, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers, O'Reilly, page 69:

     When code is minified, all comments are removed, as well as unneeded whitespace characters (space, newline, and tab).

Related terms

• minification (noun form)
  • 2010, Stoyan Stefanov, JavaScript Patterns, O'Reilly, page 36:

    Minification is the process of eliminating white space, comments, and other non-essential parts of the JavaScript code to decrease the size of the JavaScript files that need to be transferred from the server to the browser.

Antonyms

• magnify

Translations