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.
Prefixed ** 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: