flex
Noun pluralflexes
Pluralflexes
- 1To tighten the muscles in order to display their size or strength.
Bodybuilders flex on stage while judges score each pose.
She flexed playfully after winning the arm-wrestling contest.
Similarpose
Note
Without an object, this is the bodybuilder's verb: competitors flex on stage, and a winner flexes for laughs. With an object, it names the muscle on show. Elise Title's Body Heat (1994) has a character who "flexed impressive biceps" while imagining himself up against Schwarzenegger. The point is the display rather than the movement, which is what the boasting slang later borrowed.
- 2To show off or flaunt one's superiority, especially regarding wealth, status, or accomplishments.
He only posts vacation photos to flex on his followers.
She wasn't flexing; she really did get the promotion.
Similarbrag, boast, gloat, swagger
Note
Here no prize is named. The display is aimed at people, and the target follows on: to flex on someone. The narrator of Noire's Thug-A-Licious (2006) "flexed on him with my height advantage." Big Boi's "Kill Jill" (2017) shrugs that he is hardly flexing at all. It is firmly slang, at home in hip-hop and casual talk, and out of place in formal prose.
- 3To boast about or flaunt something, such as a possession, achievement, or skill.
She flexes her designer bags in every photo she posts.
He drove past the old neighborhood just to flex his new car.
Similarflaunt, parade, display, brandish
Note
The transitive slang verb takes the thing shown off as its object: you flex a car, a bag or a skill. In 2004 the Beastie Boys rapped about an endless supply of rhymes they could flex, which shows how much at home it is in hip-hop. Used without an object and aimed at a person, it becomes showing off at someone.
- 4An instance of boasting or showing off, or something impressive enough to boast about.
Posting your acceptance letter online is the ultimate flex.
Casually mentioning her three patents was a quiet flex.
Similarboast, brag, humblebrag
Note
Slang that grew from the bodybuilder's pose: tightening a muscle for show became the name for any kind of show. It sits most naturally after an adjective, as in the ultimate flex or a quiet flex. It can name the thing boasted of as well as the boasting, such as a dinner at Masa or a film's special effects. Keep it to casual speech and writing.
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8An act of bending or tightening, as of a muscle, joint, or pliable object.
Each flex of the diving board launched her higher.
He answered the challenge with a slow flex of his biceps.
Similarbend, contraction, tensing
Oppositeextension
- 9The capacity to bend; flexibility or pliancy.
Skis with more flex handle soft snow better.
The new polymer offers excellent flex at low temperatures.
Similarflexibility, give, pliancy, suppleness, bend
Note
Latin flexus, the past participle of flecto "to bend," is the root of every meaning of the word, and here it survives as a bare quality. As a mass noun it takes more and less rather than a or an: skis have more flex, and a polymer keeps its flex in the cold. For one movement you want a single act of bending, which is countable.
- 10
Less common meanings
- 11Flexible insulated electrical wiring of any kind.
The electrician kept a reel of flex in the back of his van.
Old rubber-coated flex becomes brittle and should be replaced.
Similarcable, wire, wiring, cord
Note
Everyday British and Irish usage, where the word names the material itself and takes no article: a reel of flex, rubber-coated flex, a length of flex. Once it means a single cord fitted to a lamp, it becomes countable, as in the cord on an appliance. That use reaches Australia as well. Norman Lindsay's Dust or Polish? (1950), published in Sydney, has a shop fitted with "a flex and a reading lamp."
- 12Flexible ductwork, typically plastic stretched over a coiled metal wire that holds the tube's shape.
Installers used flex to route air from the furnace around the ceiling joists.
Crushed flex behind the wall was choking the airflow to the upstairs vents.
Similarducting
Note
Builders' shorthand for flexible duct, used as a mass noun: installers run flex rather than fitting a flex. Aaron Lubeck's Green Restorations (2010) sets out the trade-off. It is quicker and cheaper to install than metal ducts, but it loses more pressure. Runs should therefore stay under fifteen feet, with few turns and no kinks. A crushed run behind a wall is the typical failure.
- 13A point of inflection on a curve, where the bending changes from one direction to the other.
The graph of a cubic function has a single flex where its concavity reverses.
On a dose-response curve, the flex marks where growth in the effect begins to slow.
Similarinflection
Note
Geometry's short name for a point of inflection. At a flex the curvature changes sign, so the curve crosses its own tangent line there. Algebraic geometry sharpens the idea to a point where the tangent meets the curve with multiplicity at least three. The term carries the same Latin bending that sits inside the word inflection itself.
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Origin
From Latin flexus, the past participle of flecto meaning "to bend."