flow


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flow

a measurement of quantity over a specified period of time. Unlike a STOCK, which is not a function of time, a flow measures quantity passing per minute, hour, day or whatever. A common analogy is to a reservoir. The water entering and leaving the reservoir is a flow but the water actually in the reservoir at any one point in time is a stock. INCOME is a flow but WEALTH is a stock.
Collins Dictionary of Economics, 4th ed. © C. Pass, B. Lowes, L. Davies 2005
References in classic literature ?
Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (jnai, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; jiais, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b.
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others.
After passing the wall of water the current did not change or flow backward any more but continued to sweep them steadily forward.
There were signs of a surface that had shifted often as the rains poured a flow of rich eroded soil from above over the lip of the canon.
Vanstone, I suppose?" said Miss Garth, interrupting the stranger's flow of language, which, all things considered, was beginning, in her opinion, to flow rather freely.
Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night out of the holy stream, and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her.
And yet must I learn to approach thee more modestly: far too violently doth my heart still flow towards thee:--
Unwilling to disturb the flow of my comrade's spirits, I managed to stifle the complaints to which I might otherwise have given vent, and calling upon him good-humouredly to speed our banquet, I prepared myself for it by washing in the stream.
Some minutes before midday the first driblets of metal began to flow; the reservoirs filled little by little; and, by the time that the whole melting was completely accomplished, it was kept in abeyance for a few minutes in order to facilitate the separation of foreign substances.
But if it be asked how it happens that the blood in the veins, flowing in this way continually into the heart, is not exhausted, and why the arteries do not become too full, since all the blood which passes through the heart flows into them, I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician 1 of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject, and of having been the first to teach that there are many small passages at the extremities of the arteries, through which the blood received by them from the heart passes into the small branches of the veins, whence it again returns to the heart; so that its course amounts precisely to a perpetual circulation.
In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years.
Her hair was like spun gold and flowed around her in a cloud, no strand being fastened or confined by either pin or ornament or ribbon.