[fos-uhl] Pronunciation Key | 1. | any remains, impression, or trace of a living thing of a former geologic age, as a skeleton, footprint, etc. |
| 2. | a markedly outdated or old-fashioned person or thing. |
| 3. | a linguistic form that is archaic except in certain restricted contexts, as nonce in for the nonce, or that follows a rule or pattern that is no longer productive, as the sentence So be it. |
| 4. | of the nature of a fossil: fossil insects. |
| 5. | belonging to a past epoch or discarded system; antiquated: a fossil approach to economics. |
] —Related forms
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
| fos·sil
(fŏs'əl) Pronunciation Key
n.
adj.
[From Latin fossilis, dug up, from fossus, past participle of fodere, to dig.] |
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
fossil
| fossil | |
adjective | |
| 1. | characteristic of a fossil |
noun | |
| 1. | someone whose style is out of fashion [syn: dodo] |
| 2. | the remains (or an impression) of a plant or animal that existed in a past geological age and that has been excavated from the soil |
| fossil
(fŏs'əl) Pronunciation Key
The remains or imprint of an organism from a previous geologic time. A fossil can consist of the preserved tissues of an organism, as when encased in amber, ice, or pitch, or more commonly of the hardened relic of such tissues, as when organic matter is replaced by dissolved minerals. Hardened fossils are often found in layers of sedimentary rock and along the beds of rivers that flow through them. See also index fossil, microfossil, trace fossil.
fossilize verb
|
Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
fossil
The evidence in rock of the presence of a plant or an animal from an earlier geological period. Fossils are formed when minerals in groundwater replace materials in bones and tissue, creating a replica in stone of the original organism or of their tracks. The study of fossils is the domain of paleontology. The oldest fossils (of bacteria) are 3.8 billion years old.
Note: The term is used figuratively to refer to a person with very old-fashioned or outmoded viewpoints: “That old fossil thinks that men should wear suits at the theater!”
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
fossil
1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck.
2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.)
3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS software in preference to the "supported" ROM routines, which do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the bare metal serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the hook but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in "video fossil".
[The Jargon File]
fossil
n.1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck.
2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.)
3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS software in preference to the `supported' ROM routines, which do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the bare metal serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the hook but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in `video fossil'.
Fossil, OR (city, FIPS 26650) Location: 44.99841 N, 120.21319 W
Population (1990): 399 (224 housing units)
Area: 2.0 sq km (land), 0.0 sq km (water)
Fossil
Fos"sil\, a. [L. fossilis, fr. fodere to dig: cf. F. fossile. See Fosse.]1. Dug out of the earth; as, fossil coal; fossil salt. 2. (Paleon.) Like or pertaining to fossils; contained in rocks, whether petrified or not; as, fossil plants, shells. Fossil copal, a resinous substance, first found in the blue clay at Highgate, near London, and apparently a vegetable resin, partly changed by remaining in the earth. Fossil cork, flax, paper, or wood, varieties of amianthus. Fossil farina, a soft carbonate of lime. Fossil ore, fossiliferous red hematite. --Raymond.
Fossil
Fos"sil\, n. 1. A substance dug from the earth. [Obs.] Note: Formerly all minerals were called fossils, but the word is now restricted to express the remains of animals and plants found buried in the earth. --Ure. 2. (Paleon.) The remains of an animal or plant found in stratified rocks. Most fossils belong to extinct species, but many of the later ones belong to species still living. 3. A person whose views and opinions are extremely antiquated; one whose sympathies are with a former time rather than with the present. [Colloq.]
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