refactor
Americanverb (used with object)
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to revise (text or, especially, programming code) so as to leave its meaning intact while making it more readable, more rationally arranged, or more adaptable to different contexts.
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to factor again.
Other Word Forms
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Now they’ve been spending years trying to refactor that particular law in order to take light of this new technology.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2025
I was taught to write programs that were as concise as possible, then to refactor those programs down so they took up as little memory space as possible.
From Slate ● Oct. 23, 2019
The problem is that both Microsoft and Google have a terrible track record when it comes to convincing developers to refactor their apps for new form factors, much less new platforms.
From The Verge ● Oct. 4, 2019
“Coding it into Julia made it a lot easier for me to refactor it for speed, or to rethink how I implemented it to make it go faster,” he says.
From Nature ● Jul. 29, 2019
This fixes the bug that was introduced with the refactor in 35c48634. ...then it'll update the commit message, substituting '35c48634' with the cleaned id of that commit, so the reference still makes sense.
From The Guardian ● Apr. 29, 2013
“Some of the code needs to be refactored and even rebuilt,” the IT official said in the May email.
From Salon ● Dec. 9, 2018
No one could predict how the line would shift, let alone the ordering, in a major refactoring.
From Slate ● Apr. 30, 2022
“Rumor says they’re going to do a refactoring, major criteria changes, in a few months.”
From Slate ● Apr. 30, 2022
It was the beginning of a reckoning for Facebook and the industry at large, which set to work refactoring its APIs and rethinking how it handles consumer data in general.
From The Verge ● Dec. 12, 2019
In the case of James Talcott, Inc. these new industries are largely handled by associated factors, the company itself merely refactoring, which is analogous to rediscounting in banking.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
