Hairball

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  hairball \hair"ball`\, hair ball \hair" ball`\(h[^a]r"b[e^]l`),
     n.
     a compact mass of hair that forms in the stomach of animals
     as a result of licking fur; as, the cat coughed up a hairball
     right on the new rug. [WordNet sense 1 + 2]
     [WordNet 1.5]



From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  hairball
       n : a compact mass of hair that forms in the alimentary canal
           (especially in the stomach of animals as a result of
           licking fur) [syn: {hair ball}, {trichobezoar}]

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  hairball n. 1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a
     store-and-forward network is failing to forward when it should. Often
     used in the phrase "Fido coughed up a hairball today", meaning that the
     stuck messages have just come unstuck, producing a flood of mail where
     there had previously been drought. 2. An unmanageably huge mass of
     source code. "JWZ thought the Mozilla effort bogged down because the
     code was a huge hairball." 3. Any large amount of garbage coming out
     suddenly. "Sendmail is coughing up a hairball, so expect some slowness
     accessing the Internet."