| 1. | to drop or let fall in a mass; fling down or drop heavily or suddenly: Dump the topsoil here. |
| 2. | to empty out, as from a container, by tilting or overturning. |
| 3. | to unload or empty out (a container), as by tilting or overturning. |
| 4. | to be dismissed, fired, or released from a contract: The first baseman was dumped from the team after hitting .210 for the first half of the season. |
| 5. | to transfer or rid oneself of suddenly and irresponsibly: Don't dump your troubles on me! |
| 6. | Boxing Slang.
|
| 7. | Commerce.
|
| 8. | Computers. to print, display, or record on an output medium (the contents of a computer's internal storage or the contents of a file), often at the time a program fails. |
| 9. | Slang. to kill; murder: threats to dump him if he didn't pay up. |
| 10. | to fall or drop down suddenly. |
| 11. | to throw away or discard garbage, refuse, etc. |
| 12. | Commerce.
|
| 13. | to release contents: a sewage pipe that dumps in the ocean. |
| 14. | Slang. to complain, criticize, gossip, or tell another person one's problems: He calls me up just to dump. |
| 15. | Slang: Vulgar. to defecate. |
| 16. | an accumulation of discarded garbage, refuse, etc. |
| 17. | Also called dumpsite, dumping-ground. a place where garbage, refuse, etc., is deposited. |
| 18. | Military.
|
| 19. | the act of dumping. |
| 20. | Mining.
|
| 21. | Informal. a place, house, or town that is dilapidated, dirty, or disreputable. |
| 22. | (in merchandising) a bin or specially made carton in which items are displayed for sale: Fifty copies of the best-selling paperback novel were in a dump near the checkout counter. |
| 23. | Computers. a copy of the contents of a computer's internal storage or of the contents of a file at a given instant, that is printed, displayed, or stored on an output medium. |
| 24. | dump on (someone), Informal.
|

dump operating system
1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare core dump), and most especially one consisting of hexadecimal or octal runes describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In elder days, debugging was generally done by "groveling over" a dump (see grovel); increasing use of high-level languages and interactive debuggers has made such tedium uncommon, and the term "dump" now has a faintly archaic flavour.
2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large time-sharing installations.
Unix manual page: dump(1).
[The Jargon File]
(1994-12-01)