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Other Lexicon Conventions

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.

Prefixed ** 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

conj.

conjunction

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:

Amateur Packet Radio

A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and TCP/IP for wide-area networking and BBS systems.
 

Berkeley

University of California at Berkeley
 

BBN

Bolt, Beranek & Newman
 

Cambridge

the university in England (not the city in Massachusetts where MIT happens to be located!)
 

CMU

Carnegie-Mellon University
 

Commodore

Commodore Business Machines
 

DEC

The Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq).
 

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 Système 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
 

WWW

The World-Wide-Web.
 

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.

A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These are usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet respondents in the process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These are not represented as established jargon.