WOMBAT

/wom´bat/, adj.

[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as wrestling with a wombat. See also crawling horror, SMOP. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth Hackish.

Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file responded to "HELP WOMBAT" with factual information about Real World wombats.