The New Hacker's Dictionary

meta /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ adj.,pref.

[from analytic philosophy] One level of description up. A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See hacker humor.

meta bit // n.

The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128-255. Also called high bit, alt bit, or (rarely) hobbit. Some terminals and consoles (see space-cadet keyboard) have a META shift key. Others (including, mirabile dictu, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also bucky bits.

Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of 8-bit bytes the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things were different on earlier machines with 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see space-cadet keyboard) generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys.

metasyntactic variable // n.

A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use 'foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time.

Metasyntactic variables are so called because (1) they are variables in the metalanguage used to talk about programs etc; (2) they are variables whose values are often variables (as in usages usages like "the value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar"). However, it has been plausibly suggested that the real reason for the term "metasyntactic variable" is that it sounds good.

To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures:

foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...:

MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this lexicon!). At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts qux before quux.

bazola, ztesch:

Stanford (from mid-'70s on).

foo, bar, thud, grunt:

This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include gorp.

foo, bar, fum:

This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.

fred, jim, sheila, barney :

See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms.

corge, grault, flarp :

Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.

zxc, spqr, wombat:

Cambridge University (England).

shme

Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.

foo, bar, baz, bongo

Yale, late 1970s.

spam

Python programmers.

snork

Brown University, early 1970s.

foo, bar, zot

Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

blarg, wibble

New Zealand.

toto, titi, tata, tutu

France.

pippo, pluto, paperino

Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-per-ee'-no/ are the Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck.

aap, noot, mies

The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board.

oogle, foogle, boogle; zork, gork, bork

These two series (which may be continued with other initial consonents) are reportedly common in England, and said to go back to Lewis Carroll.