Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated September 2025
Verified for the 2026 exam
Verified for the 2026 exam•Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated September 2025
Definition
Compression is the process of reducing the size of a file without losing any important information. It is achieved by eliminating redundancies and encoding data more efficiently.
Related terms
Lossless Compression: This type of compression reduces file size without any loss of data quality.
Lossy Compression: This type of compression sacrifices some data quality to achieve greater reduction in file size.
Compression Ratio: It is the measure of how much a file has been compressed, calculated as the ratio between its original size and compressed size.