3. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aitch el el/. /Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.

4. Vowels are represented as follows:

a back, that ar far, mark aw flaw, caught ay bake, rain e less, men ee easy, ski eir their, software i trip, hit i: life, sky o father, palm oh flow, sew oo loot, through or more, door ow out, how oy boy, coin uh but, some u put, foot y yet, young yoo few, chew [y]oo /oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)

A /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an upside-down `e'). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.

Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No, UNIX weenies, this does *not* mean `pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)

: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.

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.

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.

:Format For New Entries: ========================

All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be considered donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this File, and may be used in subsequent paper editions. Submissions may be edited for accuracy, clarity and concision.

Try to conform to the format already being used --- head-words separated from text by a colon (double colon for topic entries), cross-references in curly brackets (doubled for topic entries), pronunciations in slashes, etymologies in square brackets, single-space after definition numbers and word classes, etc. Stick to the standard ASCII character set (7-bit printable, no high-half characters or [nt]roff/TeX/Scribe escapes), as one of the versions generated from the master file is an info document that has to be viewable on a character tty.

We are looking to expand the file's range of technical specialties covered. There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the scientific computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities; also in numerical analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design, language design, and many other related fields. Send us your jargon!

We are *not* interested in straight technical terms explained by textbooks or technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates `underground' meanings or aspects not covered by official histories. We are also not interested in `joke' entries --- there is a lot of humor in the file but it must flow naturally out of the explanations of what hackers do and how they think.

It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have spread to the point of being used by people who are not personally acquainted with you. We prefer items to be attested by independent submission from two different sites.

The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and re-posted from now on and will include a version number. Read it, pass it around, contribute --- this is *your* monument!

The Jargon Lexicon ******************

= A = =====

:abbrev: /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n. Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'.

:ABEND: [ABnormal END] /ah'bend/, /*-bend'/ n. Abnormal termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. Usually capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'.