hairball

3 definitions found

hairball - Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :

  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]

hairball - WordNet (r) 2.1 (2005) :

  hairball
      n 1: a compact mass of hair that forms in the alimentary canal
           (especially in the stomach of animals as a result of
           licking fur) [syn: hairball, hair ball, trichobezoar]

hairball - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  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."