accordion

plural accordions · alternative obsolete accordeon

1. A box-shaped musical instrument played by compressing or expanding its bellows while pressing its buttons or its keys, causing pallets to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel (reeds).

   A disreputable accordion that had a leak somewhere and breathed louder than it squawked.

   1869, Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

2. computingA vertical list of items that can be individually expanded and collapsed to reveal their contents.
3. attributivefigurativelySomething, or set of things (concepts, etc), which can be expanded (or extended) and collapsed, like the musical instrument's pleated, folding bellows.

   See also: telescoping

   5 more examples

   "Accordion" skirts are named from the musical instrument of that title, because the peculiar plaiting draws out and falls together again, in the same kind of folds, and with the same effect.

   1885, Demorest's Monthly Magazine, page 206

   During the 1980s, accordion skirts became a popular style. Near the end of one winter season, I found a suit with a blazer-style jacket and an accordion-pleated skirt on sale at one of Birmingham's better department stores and placed it on layaway[…]

   2018 September 19, Ruby Y. Pruett, Daughter of the Noble Orphan, WestBow Press, →ISBN

   […] lugging their accordion cameras and bulky tripods from platform to hillock to ladder—even to the rooftop of a moving supply train—seeking to claim the most advantageous site for recording tomorrow's event.

   2012 April 3, Diane L. Wilson, Tracks, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 224

   I see myself losing you when the truth is we've just planted the pink bud of a love affair. There is no relationship here, and yet I look around this place and I have the disorienting sensation that I've been here for years. As if it's an intimate cove of my history and an accordion of memories lives here, only just beginning to unfold.

   2013 12, Lindsay Evelyn Hamilton, Lily Whites of Steel, Author House, →ISBN, page 308

   […] her mind leaped forward many decades to a vision of her adult children […] This whole exchange would come to pass, subtracting the part about the sunporch and adding the latent disgust they eventually extended to her too, ducking her embrace whenever she reached for them, which was often. She'd remember this night in the yard and her vague premonition […] The accordion of memories would leave her feeling fated and alive and connected to every detail—the sharpening rod on the stoop, the red chiggers swarming on the well, the bark peeling off the birches, the crowded nettles. Of the moment in the country when everything fell apart.

   2019 June 25, Chris Dennis, Here Is What You Do: Stories, Soho Press, →ISBN, page 86

present singular third person accordions · participle present accordioning · participle past accordioned · past accordioned · alternative obsolete accordeon

1. intransitivetransitiveTo fold up, in the manner of an accordion

   It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came free[…].

   2005, Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

   2 more examples

   I slit the wrapping with my pocketknife and the clothesline accordioned out in stiff loops.

   1980, Stephen King, The Mist, Viking Press

   Still in reverse, she goosed the gas and accordioned the running board a fraction of an inch more.

   2000 December 29, Charles Dickinson, “Qi”, in Chicago Reader