clean Used of hardware or software designs, implies elegance in the small , that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is grungy or crufty. 2. v. To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter: I'm cleaning up my account. I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg free on that partition.