1.11. 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 before A, except that leading dash is ignored. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.

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 open source 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:

Abbreviations

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:

Origins

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 HP).

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 abbreviations 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 Dictionaryof the TMRC Language, originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959

UCLA

University of California, 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

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.