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Table of Contents

Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic characters are sorted after Z. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.

The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (`:') at the left margin. This convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that benefit from knowing where entry boundaries are, but aren't as context-sensitive as humans.

In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {} used to bracket words which themselves have entries in the File. This isn't done all the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that a reminder seems useful that the term has a jargon meaning and one might wish to refer to its entry.

In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are distinguished from those for ordinary entries by being followed by "::" rather than ":"; similarly, references are surrounded by "{{" and "}}" rather than "{" and "}".

Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in `slanted type'. A defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an explanation of it.

Prefix * is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect usage.

We follow the `logical' quoting convention described in the Writing Style section above. In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual excerpts of text or (sometimes invented) speech. Scare quotes (which mark a word being used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an utterance into the string of letters or words that name it) are both rendered with single quotes.

References such as `malloc(3)' and `patch(1)' are to UNIX facilities (some of which, such as `patch(1)', are actually freeware distributed over USENET). The UNIX manuals use `foo(n)' to refer to item foo in section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities. Sections 4, 5, and 7 of the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not referred to in any of the entries.

Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here:

abbrev.

abbreviation

adj.

adjective

adv.

adverb

alt.

alternate

cav.

caveat

esp.

especially

excl.

exclamation

imp.

imperative

interj.

interjection

n.

noun

obs.

obsolete

pl.

plural

poss.

possibly

pref.

prefix

prob.

probably

prov.

proverbial

quant.

quantifier

suff.

suffix

syn.

synonym (or synonymous with)

v.

verb (may be transitive or intransitive)

var.

variant

vi.

intransitive verb

vt.

transitive verb

Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates two possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes one that is markedly less common than the primary.

Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known to have originated there, we have tried to so indicate. Here is a list of abbreviations used in etymologies:

Berkeley

University of California at Berkeley

Cambridge

the university in England (*not* the city in Massachusetts where

MIT happens to be located!)

BBN

Bolt, Beranek & Newman

CMU

Carnegie-Mellon University

Commodore

Commodore Business Machines

DEC

The Digital Equipment Corporation

Fairchild

The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group

Fidonet

See the {Fidonet} entry

IBM

International Business Machines

MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI Lab

culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including the

Tech Model Railroad Club

NRL

Naval Research Laboratories

NYU

New York University

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary

Purdue

Purdue University

SAIL

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford

University)

SI

From Syst`eme International, the name for the standard

conventions of metric nomenclature used in the sciences

Stanford

Stanford University

Sun

Sun Microsystems

TMRC

Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at

MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from `An Abridged Dictionary

of the TMRC Language', originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959

UCLA

University of California at Los Angeles

UK

the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)

USENET

See the {USENET} entry

WPI

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community of

PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s

XEROX PARC

XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering research in

user interface design and networking

Yale

Yale University

Some other etymology abbreviations such as {UNIX} and {PDP-10} refer to technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems, processors, or other environments. The fact that a term is labelled with any one of these abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use is confined to that culture. In particular, many terms labelled `MIT' and `Stanford' are in quite general use. We have tried to give some indication of the distribution of speakers in the usage notes; however, a number of factors mentioned in the introduction conspire to make these indications less definite than might be desirable.