| 1. | a small mass of lead or other heavy material, as that suspended by a line and used to measure the depth of water or to ascertain a vertical line. Compare plumb line. |
| 2. | true according to a plumb line; perpendicular. |
| 3. | Informal. downright or absolute. |
| 4. | in a perpendicular or vertical direction. |
| 5. | exactly, precisely, or directly. |
| 6. | Informal. completely or absolutely: She was plumb mad. You're plumb right. |
| 7. | to test or adjust by a plumb line. |
| 8. | to make vertical. |
| 9. | Shipbuilding. horn (def. 31). |
| 10. | to sound with or as with a plumb line. |
| 11. | to measure (depth) by sounding. |
| 12. | to examine closely in order to discover or understand: to plumb someone's thoughts. |
| 13. | to seal with lead. |
| 14. | to weight with lead. |
| 15. | to provide (a house, building, apartment, etc.) with plumbing. |
| 16. | to work as a plumber. |
| 17. | out of or off plumb, not corresponding to the perpendicular; out of true. |

plumb (plŭm) n.
v. tr.
To work as a plumber. [Middle English, lead, a plumb, from Old French plomb, from Latin plumbum, lead.] plumb'a·ble adj., plumb'ness n. |
plumbing
(Unix) Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of "pipelines" that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temporary file grinding encapsulated in a shell script. This is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other operating systems such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities.
The tee utility is specifically designed for plumbing.
[The Jargon File]
(1995-02-23)