flag

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   decorate with flags

   the building was flagged for the holiday

2. 2
   noun

   A piece of cloth, often decorated with an emblem, used as a visual signal or symbol.

   The vote in the Bundestag (parliament) on Thursday makes defiling foreign flags equal to the crime of defiling the German flag. […] The new law also applies to acts of defilement besides burning, such as publicly ripping a flag up.

3. 3
   noun

   The design that could be placed on a flag, typically a rectangular graphic that is used to represent an entity (like a country, organisation or group of people) or an idea.

   The flag of France has three vertical stripes.

4. 4
   noun

   In a command line interface, a command parameter requesting optional behavior or otherwise modifying the action of the command being invoked.

   This will be used as a help message if the user passes in the --help flag, like so: […]

5. 5
   noun

   A mechanical indicator that pops up to draw the pilot's attention to a problem or malfunction.

   I was shooting an IFR approach down the San Francisco slot, when all of a sudden the ILS flag popped up.

6. 6
   noun

   A sequence of faces of a given polytope, one of each dimension up to that of the polytope (formally, though in practice not always explicitly, including the null face and the polytope itself), such that each face in the sequence is part of the next-higher dimension face.

   A flag of P is a sequence (F₀, F₁, ..., Fₘ) of faces of P such that dim Fᵢ = i for each i and Fᵢ is a side of Fᵢ₊₁ for each i < m.[…]A regular polytope in X is a polytope P in X whose group of symmetries in <P> acts transitively on its flags.

7. 7
   noun

   A dark piece of material that can be mounted on a stand to block or shape the light.

   At the other extreme, with limitless budgets all they have to do is dream up amazing lighting rigs to be constructed and operated by the huge team of gaffers and sparks, with their generators, discharge lights, flags, gobos and brutes.

8. 8
   noun

   An apron.

   Suppose you try a different tack, / And on the square you flash your flag?

Etymology

From Middle English flag, flagge (“flag”), further etymology uncertain. Perhaps from or related to early Middle English flage (name for a baby's garment) and Old English flagg, flacg (“cataplasm, poultice, plaster”). Or, perhaps ultimately imitative, or otherwise drawn from Proto-Germanic *flaką (“something flat”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- (“flat, broad, plain”), referring to the shape. Germanic cognates include Saterland Frisian Flaage (“flag”), West Frisian flagge (“flag”), Dutch vlag (“flag”), German Flagge (“flag”), Swedish flagga (“flag”), Danish flag (“flag, ship's flag”). Compar…