flatten

James C. Scott called this legibility, the way institutions flatten complicated people into categories they can manage.

From Slate ● Aug. 21, 2026

The researchers found that rift flanks begin to flatten relatively quickly once tectonic movement ends.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 25, 2026

River can be a good thing, social media algorithms can flatten the context around the waterway, particularly when it comes to demographic changes in nearby neighborhoods.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 13, 2026

Sharing a chatbot creates security vulnerabilities and can flatten the user experience by muddling personalization features, OpenAI warns.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 28, 2026

Time was slow ’nough that I seent his nose flatten out and spread o’er his cheeks, looking like someone had slapped him in the face with a piece of brownish Georgia ham.

From "The Journey of Little Charlie" by Christopher Paul Curtis

A hot-strip mill flattens thick slabs of heated steel into long, thin ribbons of sheet steel that are wound into coils and shipped to customers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 8, 2026

Like VIX, it is not as bullish as it could be: The term structure of the VIX futures rises in the front end of the curve but then flattens out.

From MarketWatch ● May 8, 2026

But funding a nongambler’s entrance into the gambling world as a kind of comedic protagonist not only puts the writer at risk but also flattens the seriousness of the story’s subject.

From Slate ● May 5, 2026

But this approach effectively flattens the data - anything above 500 is treated the same on official monitors, even if the real concentration is far higher.

From BBC ● Nov. 15, 2025

She flattens out the creases as well as she can and drags the floor lamp closer and places the print before her son.

From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

When Thoreau spews nonsense, such as men, “like the earth, revolve mainly from west to east, and so are flattened at the poles,” let’s call the silliness by its real name.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 14, 2026

Water vole volunteers 'get very excited by flattened poo'

From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2026

That night, a million hushed “sorry!’s” could be heard throughout the auditorium as hordes of alternatively inclined women — because there were mostly women — flattened themselves to move through their row.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 13, 2026

He pointed to a pile of litter and flattened cardboard boxes on the concrete ground where he said he was sleeping at night.

From Barron's ● Aug. 1, 2026

He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him.

From "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

City plans call for flattening a downtown convention center, a crumbling church and several nearby buildings.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 4, 2026

However, the yield curve began rolling over in April 2025 and has been flattening again since year-end.

From Barron's ● Jun. 26, 2026

The bond market is not going to take any of this lightly, either, and the clearest sign of this would be a continued flattening of the yield curve.

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 24, 2026

Critics of the change say this risks flattening meaningful distinctions between religious identities, particularly for service members whose beliefs do not fall neatly into major denominational groupings.

From Salon ● Jun. 6, 2026

When you start to think of the world as flat, or at least in the process of flattening, a lot of things make sense in ways they did not before.

From "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman