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.
* The use of the term “open source” is problematic because it is unqualified here, although it is another indicator of Eric Raymond’s politics. He is a libertarian of very strong bent, as is not uncommon among the major players of Silicon Valley. For this reason, he feels that there is no significant difference between the terms free software and open source. For my part, due to the developments in software lockdown and licensing abuse over the past ten years, I have been forced to revise my own views and now must agree that these terms are not equivalent, and the difference is non-trivial. Raymond does not appear to have changed his views on the matter, based on the lack of revisions to the main Jargon File since 1 October 2004.
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 |
| refr. | refrain |
| 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 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 Dictionary of 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.