reflow

English

Etymology

re- +‎ flow

Verb

reflow (third-person singular simple present reflows, present participle reflowing, simple past and past participle reflowed)

1. (intransitive) To flow back again; to flow once more.

   The sea flows and reflows.

   • 1838, [Letitia Elizabeth] Landon (indicated as editor), chapter XX, in Duty and Inclination: […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 257:

     Such an act, you may conceive, had its due weight upon my feelings; but, alas! though it reminded me of the loss I had sustained, and caused my tears to reflow, the remains of my departed husband were not there,—they were left upon a foreign shore.

2. (transitive, chiefly engineering) To cause to flow again, to remelt.

   Reflowing solder is a common form of rework in the manufacture of printed circuit boards: you heat up the solder and it flows where it should have flowed the first time.

3. (transitive, computing, wordprocessing) To modify the layout of text around other objects in a document.
   • 2008, Trish Meyer, Chris Meyer, Creating motion graphics with After Effects:

     The latter option will reflow text to even out the spacing within each paragraph.

Noun

reflow (plural reflows)

1. A flowing back again.

   the flow and reflow of the tide

2. (computing) The process of recreating the layout of a document when some of its component elements have changed.

Anagrams

• Flower, Fowler, Wolfer, flower, flowre, fowler, wolfer