What is the difference between decompress and uncompress? Is there any?
Context:
The receiving node has to uncompress/decompress the data.
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1decompress -- that's it.– KrisCommented Jan 31, 2012 at 11:31
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@Kris Post that! :P– AlenannoCommented Jan 31, 2012 at 11:34
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But you would say uncompressed data instead of decompressed data?– Marc MessingCommented Jan 31, 2012 at 11:43
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1@MarcMessing decompressed is a past participle of the verb decompress. Uncompressed is an adjective.– AlenannoCommented Jan 31, 2012 at 11:56
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3Until the recent burgeoning of computer terms, un- was hardly ever used with a verb unless the verb had a sense of fastening, attaching or enclosing. (With an adjective, including a past participle, un- was used freely). Compress seems to me to be marginally in this group, so uncompress might have occurred, but I don't believe it did. Uncompressed, on the other hand, was unexceptional. Nowadays all sorts of actions that are not reversible in the real world can be reversed in software, so there are many more verbs with un-.– Colin FineCommented Jan 1, 2013 at 0:23
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5 Answers
decompress — that's it.
Uncompressed = not compressed; may never have been compressed in the first place. Just plain data is uncompressed data in every sense. To specifically refer to that which has undergone the process of decompressing, we would say decompressed data. Looking at it in another way, data before being compressed is uncompressed — that extracted from compressed format is decompressed data.
[Edit-1] Also, per Alenanno,
decompressed is a past participle of the verb decompress. Uncompressed is an adjective.
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Also adding the reference I made above, might help (for nonnative speakers, especially). Feel free to add it to your answer. :)– AlenannoCommented Jan 31, 2012 at 12:05
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2Seems the Qt people could learn a thing or two from this answer :P Commented Feb 6, 2015 at 0:02
EDIT
I would think that:
******uncompressed data* is data that was never altered
******decompressed data* is data that has been compressed, then returned to its original state by the process of decompression.
Decompress and uncompress seem to be used synonymously in the context of computing, although decompress seems to be used more frequently. A search on MSDN for uncompress* returns 731 hits, while decompress* returns 4,450 hits.
Seaching on SO gives similar results. There are
- 22 questions tagged with uncompress
- none tagged with uncompression,
- 651 occurrences of uncompress and
- 34 occurrences of uncompression.
Total tag count = 22
Total word count = 685
In contrast, there are
- 39 questions tagged with decompress
- 110 questions tagged with decompression
- 1,467 occurrences of decompress and
- 865 occurrences of decompression.
Total tag count = 149
Total word count = 2,332
I landed here because of my condumdrum with 'uncompressable', which is rejected by MS Word spell check in favor of 'incompressable'. After decades in IT I'm astonished to see that all the usual resources come down on the side of 'in-'. I was using the term in the sense of 'data that cannot be usefully compressed'. Never let it be said that I'm incorrectable.
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Microsoft’s ideas about how you should write are incorrigibly bad. Turn all that crap off.– tchrist ♦Commented Dec 8, 2013 at 3:35
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From an English language perspective, I would think that uncompressed is anything that is not compressed irrespective of whether it was compressed earlier or not. From an information technology language standpoint, I have always referred to decompressed data as something that was compressed earlier and then returned to its original state. Having said this, while reading through some SAS course notes I chanced upon the term uncompress, hence my presence on this page.
Uncompressed data will never be "uncompressed" once it's been compressed — it'll be decompressed.
