Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/

FOLDOC is a searchable dictionary of acronyms, jargon, programming languages, tools, architecture, operating systems, networking, theory, conventions, standards, mathematics, telecoms, electronics, institutions, companies, projects, products, history, in fact anything to do with computing.

Copyright 1993 by Denis Howe

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, Front- or Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

Please refer to the dictionary as “The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, http://www.foldoc.org/, Editor Denis Howe” or similar.

The dictionary has been growing since 1985 and now contains over 13000 definitions totalling nearly five megabytes of text. Entries are cross-referenced to each other and to related resources elsewhere on the net.

Where LaTeX commands for certain non-ASCII symbols are mentioned, they are described in their own entries. “\” is also used to represent the Greek lower-case lambda used in lambda-calculus. Cross-references to other entries look like this. Note that not all cross-references actually lead anywhere yet, but if you find one that leads to something inappropriate, please let me know. Dates after entries indicate when that entry was last updated. They do not imply that it was up-to-date at that time.

You can search the latest version of the dictionary by WWW (URL http://www.foldoc.org/). If you find an entry that is wrong or inadequate please let me know.

See Pronunciation for how to interpret the pronunciation given for some entries.