Discover

Literally, 'overflow' occurs when the volume of a substance exceeds the capacity of its intended container. A river in flood, for instance, may "overflow its banks". It is also used in a metaphorical sense, as "overflowing with enthusiasm." Other more specific uses of the term include:

★ In telecommunication and telephony, 'overflow' may refer to (see Federal Standard 1037C and MIL-STD-188)
:#the generation of potential traffic that exceeds the capacity of a communications system or subsystem.
:#a count of telephone call attempts made on groups of busy trunks or access lines.
:#traffic handled by overflow equipment.
:#traffic that exceeds the capacity of the switching equipment and is therefore lost.
:#on a particular route, excess traffic that is offered to another route, ''i.e.'', an alternate route.

★ In computing, the term 'overflow' can refer to
:#arithmetic overflow
:#stack overflow in which a computer program makes too many subroutine calls and its call stack runs out of space.
:#Buffer overflow (in the context of digital communication) which happens when the incoming data size exceeds that which can be accommodated by a buffer, resulting in the loss of information.

★ In plumbing, a toilet, sink or rainwater tank may overflow, spilling water onto the surrounding area. Many sinks have built-in overflow pipes to drain excess water before it reaches the top.

★ Overflow (band), a contemporary Christian pop rock band.

★ Overflow (Croatian band), a punk band from Croatia.

★ 0verflow, a Japanese eroge developer.

★ Overflow (software), a NASA-developed computational fluid dynamics program using overset (Chimera) grids.