Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of several hardened steel tools with cutting ridges for forming, smoothing, or reducing especially metallic surfaces.
  • noun A nail file.
  • noun Chiefly British A crafty or artful person.
  • transitive verb To smooth, reduce, or remove with or as if with a file.
  • noun A container, such as a cabinet or folder, for keeping papers in order.
  • noun A collection of papers or published materials kept or arranged in convenient order.
  • noun Computers A collection of data or program records stored as a unit with a single name.
  • noun A line of persons, animals, or things positioned one behind the other.
  • noun A line of troops or military vehicles so positioned.
  • noun Games Any of the rows of squares that run forward and backward between players on a playing board in chess or checkers.
  • noun Archaic A list or roll.
  • intransitive verb To put or keep (papers, for example) in useful order for storage or reference.
  • intransitive verb To enter (a legal document) as an official record.
  • intransitive verb To send or submit (copy) to a newspaper.
  • intransitive verb To initiate (a lawsuit).
  • intransitive verb To march or walk in a line.
  • intransitive verb To put items in a file.
  • intransitive verb To make application; apply.
  • intransitive verb To enter one's name in a political contest.
  • idiom (on file) In or as if in a file for easy reference.
  • transitive verb To sully or defile.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To rub or cut with a file, or as if with a file; render smooth, sharp, even, etc., by rubbing with a file; remove with a file: as, to file a saw; to file off a tooth.
  • Figuratively, to smooth; polish; correct; improve.
  • To defile; pollute; contaminate; degrade.
  • To place or fasten on a file; fasten, as papers, on a line or wire, for preservation; hence, to arrange in order, or insert in a bundle, as papers; arrange in a given order; classify.
  • Specifically To place in due manner, as a document, among the records of a court or a public office.
  • To receive, or receive and indorse, as a document so placed.
  • To march in a file or line, as soldiers, not abreast, but one after another.
  • noun A metal (usually steel) tool, having a rectangular, triangular, round, or irregular section, and either tapering or of uniform width and thickness, covered on one or more of its surfaces with teeth or transverse or oblique ridges, used for abrading, reducing, or smoothing metal, ivory, wood, or other resistant materials. See phrases below.
  • noun Figuratively, any means employed to refine or polish something, as literary style.
  • noun In entomology, a surface covered with fine parallel ridges, on which another surface can be rubbed, producing the sound called stridulation. These organs are found on various parts of the body, as the wings, thorax, and abdomen.
  • noun The rough spines of a sea-urchin, as a cidarid.
  • noun A thread, string, or line; particularly, a line or wire on which papers are strung in due order for preservation and reference.
  • noun The whole number of papers thus arranged; hence, a collection of papers arranged according to date or subject for the sake of ready reference; also, a bundle of papers tied together with the title of each indorsed: as, a file of newspapers; a file of writs.
  • noun A roll, list, or catalogue.
  • noun A docket; a calendar.
  • noun A row of persons or things arranged one behind another; military, a row of soldiers forming a line from front to rear; the number of men constituting the depth of a battalion or squadron.
  • noun Regular succession of thought or narration; uniform tenor; thread of discourse.
  • noun One of the lines of squares on a chess-board running directly from player to player: opposed to rank. See chess.
  • noun Same as rank and file. See phrase below.
  • noun In some parts of the United States, a cloth used in cleaning or wiping a floor. Also file-cloth.
  • noun In heraldry, same as label.
  • noun Hence— The general body of any party or society, as distinguished from the leaders.
  • Vile.
  • noun A wretch; a villain: a vague term of abuse.
  • noun A pickpocket; a thief.
  • noun [See etym.] A hard, cunning person; a shrewd person; a deep or artful man: as, a sly old file.
  • noun An individual soldier.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To set in order; to arrange, or lay away, esp. as papers in a methodical manner for preservation and reverence; to place on file; to insert in its proper place in an arranged body of papers.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English fīl; see peig- in Indo-European roots.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Middle English filen, to put documents on file, from Old French filer, to spin thread, to put documents on a thread, from Late Latin fīlāre, to spin, draw out in a long line, from Latin fīlum, thread; see gwhī- in Indo-European roots.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English filen, from Old English fȳlan; see pū̆- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French file, from filer, “to spin out”, “arrange one behind another”, Latin fīlāre, from filum, “thread”.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English feol. Cognate with Dutch vijl, German Feile, West Frisian file.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English filen ("to defile"), from Old English fȳlan ("to defile, make foul"), from fūl ("foul"). More at defile.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French fil ("thread"), Latin filum ("thread").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word file.

Examples

  • = \ file = \%file% file = I: % file% files. = file. "` n"

    AutoHotkey Community 2010

  • = \ file = \%file% file = I: % file% files. = file. "` n"

    AutoHotkey Community 2010

  • = \ file = \%file% file = I: % file% files. = file. "` n"

    AutoHotkey Community 2010

  • = \ file = \%file% file = I: % file% files. = file. "` n"

    AutoHotkey Community 2010

  • PL1 ' (SEGmented loader) would take the binary file, link all the binary libraries that you specify and produce a file named

    Phrack Issue #15 Elric of Imrryr's Issue 1987

  • File name suffixes help to identify the file contents with regard to the language the source code was written in and the contents of the file.

    Phrack Issue #15 Elric of Imrryr's Issue 1987

  • Im using IIS for the FTP and Apache for the front end on the same server. when using the code above, remote_file variable would mean the file to be saved to the ftp server, but for the $file variable, would that be the file on the client, or the same path that the upload script resides?

    CodingForums.com trickydicky 2010

  • Added $file (). sig property, checks digital signature of a file.

    Tweakers.net Mixed RSS Feed 2010

  • TXT '- o - name' *. txt '| while read file; do sed -- in-place - e 's/6.1 SNAPSHOT/x. y.z/g' $file; done

    Dashboard RSS Feed 2010

  • Im using IIS for the FTP and Apache for the front end on the same server. when using the code above, remote_file variable would mean the file to be saved to the ftp server, but for the $file variable, would that be the file on the client, or the same path that the upload script resides?

    CodingForums.com trickydicky 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • Cabinets designed to store and provide access to unbound paper appeared in offices in the decades immediately prior to the invention of the vertical filing cabinet. These structures were to be used with one of the new filing technologies introduced to manage the growing volume of loose paper, which had increased for a number of reasons . . . . In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, filing developed with the invention of the box file, flat file, and document file. The box file was a cardboard box shaped like a book (although popular, these were rarely stored in cabinets). As the name suggests, the flat file (also known as the board file) stored paper flat on a board. The more ambiguously named document file stored folded papers upright on their long edge.
    Craig Robertson, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2021), pp. 70–71.

    June 21, 2021