Glossaries › Computing and tech terms glossary

Computing and tech terms glossary

Computing and tech terms explained in plain English. 1,680 words and meanings, most familiar first.

Word	Meaning
like verb	To show support for, or approval of, something posted on the Internet by marking it with a vote.
if conjunction	In the event that a statement is true (a programming statement that acts in a similar manner).
up adjective	Functional; working.
tell noun	A private message to an individual in a chat room; a whisper.
make noun	A software utility for automatically building large applications, or an implementation of this utility.
god noun	The person who owns and runs a multi-user dungeon.
wait noun	Short for wait state.
call noun	The act of jumping to a subprogram, saving the means to return to the original point.
home noun	The landing page of a website; the site's homepage.
long noun	A long integer variable, twice the size of an int, two or four times the size of a short, and half of a long long.
name noun	A unique identifier, generally a string of characters.
father noun	The archived older version of a file that immediately precedes the current version, and was itself derived from the grandfather.
nice verb	To run a process with a specified (usually lower) priority.
world noun	The part of an operating system distributed with the kernel, consisting of the shell and other programs.
ask noun	A message sent to a blog on social networking platform Tumblr, which can be publicly posted and replied to by the recipient.
own verb	To illicitly obtain superuser or root access to a computer system, thereby having access to all of the user files on that system; pwn.
kill verb	To disconnect (a user) involuntarily from the network.
car noun	Deliberate misspelling of cat.
son noun	The current version of a file, derived from the preceding father file.
job noun	A task, or series of tasks, carried out in batch mode (especially on a mainframe computer).
room noun	An IRC or chat room.
live adjective	Of an object or value: that may potentially be used in the future execution of a program.
miss noun	The situation where an item is not found in a cache and therefore needs to be explicitly loaded.
head noun	The part of a disk drive responsible for reading and writing data.
bit noun	A binary digit, generally represented as a 1 or 0.
run noun	The execution of a program or model
open adjective	In current use; mapped to part of memory.
case noun	A section of code representing one of the actions of a conditional switch.
eat verb	To consume (an exception, an event, etc.) so that other parts of the program do not receive it.
part verb	To leave (an IRC channel).
stuff verb	To compress (a file or files) in the StuffIt format, to be unstuffed later.
far adjective	Outside the currently selected segment in a segmented memory architecture.
hit verb	To use; to connect to.
point verb	To direct the central processing unit to seek information at a certain location in memory.
mine noun	A machine or network of machines used to extract units of a cryptocurrency.
body noun	The code of a subroutine, contrasted to its signature and parameters.
sleep verb	To wait for a period of time without performing any action.
close verb	To terminate an application, window, file or database connection, etc.
word noun	A fixed-size group of bits handled as a unit by a machine and which can be stored in or retrieved from a typical register (so that it has the same size as such a register).
read verb	To fetch data from (a storage medium, etc.).
cut verb	To remove (text, a picture, etc.) and place in memory in order to paste at a later time.
child noun	A data item, process, or object which has a subservient or derivative role relative to another.
break noun	The separation between lines, paragraphs or pages of a written text.
war noun	An argument between two or more people with opposing opinions on a topic or issue.
trust noun	Affirmation of the access rights of a user of a computer system.
free adjective	With no or only freedom-preserving limitations on distribution or modification.
news noun	Posts published on newsgroups
bed noun	The flat surface of a scanner on which a document is placed to be scanned.
save verb	To write a file to disk or other storage medium.
clear verb	To reset or unset; to return to an empty state or to zero.
sort noun	An algorithm for sorting a list of items into a particular sequence.
promise noun	A placeholder object representing the eventual result of an asynchronous operation.
safe adjective	Of a programming language, type-safe or more generally offering well-defined behavior despite programming errors.
luck noun	The results of a random number generator.
fast adjective	Able to transfer data in a short period of time.
hang verb	To stop responding to manual input devices such as the keyboard and mouse.
catch verb	To handle an exception.
master noun	A device that is controlling other devices or is an authoritative source.
write verb	To record data mechanically or electronically.
voice noun	A flag associated with a user on a channel, determining whether or not they can send messages to the channel.
quiet adjective	Requiring little or no interaction.
pull noun	The situation where a client sends out a request for data from a server, as in server pull, pull technology
return verb	To relinquish control to the calling procedure.
fault verb	To undergo a page fault.
future noun	An object that retrieves the value of a promise.
drop verb	Of a programme, software, a music album or song, etc.: to enter public distribution.
step noun	A constant difference between consecutive values in a series.
clean verb	To remove unnecessary files, etc. from (a directory, etc.).
throw verb	To send (an error) to an exception-handling mechanism in order to interrupt normal processing.
picture noun	A format string in the COBOL programming language.
state noun	The stable condition of a processor during a particular clock cycle.
pass noun	A run through a document as part of a translation, compilation or reformatting process.
ship noun	A spaceship (the type of pattern in a cellular automaton).
system noun	A set of hardware and software operating in a computer.
information noun	[…] the meaning that a human assigns to data by means of the known conventions used in its representation.

Word	Meaning
train noun	A software release schedule.
attack noun	An attempt to exploit a vulnerability in a computer system.
history noun	A record of previous user events, especially of visited web pages in a browser.
near adjective	Within the currently selected segment in a segmented memory architecture.
table noun	A lookup table, most often a set of vectors.
handle noun	A reference to an object or structure that can be stored in a variable.
ring noun	Short for webring.
box noun	A computer, or the case in which it is housed.
group noun	A number of users with the same rights with respect to accession, modification, and execution of files, computers and peripherals.
single noun	A floating-point number having half the precision of a double-precision value.
join noun	An intersection of data in two or more database tables.
short noun	An integer variable having a smaller range than normal integers; usually two bytes long.
radio noun	The continuous broadcasting of sound via the Internet in the style of traditional radio.
key noun	One of several small, usually square buttons on a typewriter or computer keyboard, mostly corresponding to text characters.
gold adjective	In a finished state, ready for manufacturing.
bar noun	A metasyntactic variable representing an unspecified entity, often the second in a series, following foo.
stick noun	A memory stick.
record noun	A set of data relating to a single individual or item.
bank noun	A contiguous block of memory that is of fixed, hardware-dependent size, but often larger than a page and partitioning the memory such that two distinct banks do not overlap.
list noun	A codified representation of a list used to store data or in processing; especially, in the Lisp programming language, a data structure consisting of a sequence of zero or more items.
service noun	A function that is provided by one program or machine for another.
forward noun	An e-mail message that is forwarded to another recipient or recipients; an electronic chain letter.
park verb	To register a domain name, but make no use of it (See domain parking)
rich adjective	Elaborate, having complex formatting, multimedia, or depth of interaction.
cell noun	The minimal unit of a cellular automaton that can change state and has an associated behavior.
share noun	A configuration enabling a resource to be shared over a network.
card noun	A removable electronic device that may be inserted into a powered electronic device to provide additional capability.
broken adjective	Badly designed or implemented.
private verb	To make something hidden from the public (without deleting it permanently).
wall noun	A personal notice board listing messages of interest to a particular user.
machine noun	A computer.
carry noun	The bit or digit that is carried in an addition operation.
apartment noun	A conceptual space used for separation in the threading architecture. Objects in one apartment cannot directly access those in another, but must use a proxy.
evil adjective	Undesirable; harmful; bad practice.
store verb	To write (something) into memory or registers.
jail noun	A kind of sandbox for running a guest operating system instance.
cat noun	A program and command in Unix that reads one or more files and directs their content to the standard output.
quit verb	To close (an application).
plane noun	Any of 17 designated ranges of 216 (65,536) sequential code points each.
push verb	To add (a data item) to the top of a stack.
board noun	Short for message board.
magic noun	Complicated or esoteric code that is not expected to be generally understood.
support noun	Compatibility and functionality for a given product or feature.
dirty adjective	Containing data needing to be written back to memory or disk.
jump verb	To start executing code from a different location, rather than following the program counter.
escape verb	To cause (a single character, or all such characters in a string) to be interpreted literally, instead of with any special meaning it would usually have in the same context, often by prefixing with another character.
address noun	A number identifying a specific storage location in computer memory; a string of characters identifying a location on the internet or other network; sometimes (specifically) an e-mail address.
match verb	To be an example of a rule or regex.
blame noun	A source control feature that can show which user was responsible for a particular portion of the source code.
race noun	A race condition; a bug or problem that occurs when two or more components attempt to use the same resource at the same time.
guard noun	A Boolean expression that must evaluate to true for a branch of program execution to continue.
nine noun	A statistical unit of proportion (of reliability, purity, etc.).
bell noun	The bell character.
destroy verb	To remove data.
steal noun	A policy in database systems that a database follows which allows a transaction to be written on nonvolatile storage before its commit occurs.
kick verb	To forcibly remove a participant from an online activity.
form noun	A window or dialogue box.
mention noun	A social media feed, a list of replies or posts mentioning a person.
build verb	To construct (software) by compiling its source code.
hole noun	A security vulnerability in software which can be taken advantage of by an exploit.
track verb	To create music using tracker software.
lock noun	A mutex or other token restricting access to a resource.
engine noun	A software or hardware system responsible for a specific technical task (usually with qualifying word).
burn noun	The writing of data to a permanent storage medium like a compact disc or a ROM chip.
roll verb	To generate a random number.
double noun	A double-precision floating-point number.
empty adjective	Containing no elements (as of a string, array, or set), opposed to being null (having no valid value).
level noun	Distance from the root node of a tree structure.
memory noun	The part of a computer that stores variable executable code or data (RAM) or unalterable executable code or default data (ROM).
raise verb	To instantiate and transmit (an exception, by throwing it, or an event).
pop noun	The removal of a data item from the top of a stack.
client noun	The role of a computer application or system that requests and/or consumes the services provided by another having the role of server.
warm verb	To prepopulate (a cache) so that its contents are ready for other users.
driver noun	A device driver; a program that acts as an interface between an application and hardware, written specifically for the device it controls.
local adjective	Connected directly to a particular computer, processor, etc.; able to be accessed offline.

Meanings from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sources