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 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:
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.