flatlined

«flatlined» in Mova's school dictionary: died; the heart stopped, so the line on the heart monitor… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

verb (flatline, flatlines, flatlined, flatlining); noun (a flatline)

meaning for a pupil

1) (medical slang, euphemism) died; the heart stopped, so the line on the heart monitor became flat. tree →

2) (business, informal) stopped growing or changing; stayed at the same level: «sales have flatlined». tree →

3) (informal) became very tired or lost all energy. tree →

sense in the lessons

From hospital dramas and medical slang; used in news and business talk for things that stop growing; also jokingly about people being exhausted. Informal and jargon, all regions.

examples

• The patient flatlined, but the doctors brought him back. tree →
• In the TV drama, the heart monitor beeped and the man flatlined. tree →
• Sales of the toy flatlined after Christmas. tree →
• Our class's reading scores have flatlined this term. tree →
• After the cross-country race, I totally flatlined on the sofa. tree →
• The graph flatlined at 200 visitors a day. tree →
• The phone battery flatlined halfway through the film. tree →
• The company's profits have flatlined for three years. tree →

note

Trap: in a hospital it means the heart stopped (death or near death); in business it means no growth. On a graph, a flat line means the number stays the same: no increase, no decrease.

In the corpora

• "Flatlined" means died or the heart stopped, because the heart monitor shows a flat line; a business can also flatline.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «flatlined» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.