Standard Lemma guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
noun
Used as a placeholder word or metasyntactic variable.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
From the seminal text adventure game Adventure (c.1975), where it served as a "magic word"; possibly originated as a mnemonic for the subscripts of the cross product in mathematics.
