deflate deflate compression deflate/inflate compression inflate <file format, compression> A {compression} {standard} derived from {LZ77}; it is reportedly used in {zip}, {gzip}, {PKZIP}, and {png}, among others. Unlike {LZW}, deflate compression does not use patented compression {algorithms}. Used as a verb to mean to compress (not decompress!) a file which has been compressed using deflate compression. The opposite, {inflate}, means to decompress data which has been deflated. Deflate is described in {RFC 1951}. (1997-06-21)