[splat] 
| 1. | Also, splad. a broad, flat piece of wood, either pierced or solid, forming the center upright part of a chair back or the like. |
| 2. | a batten for covering joints between sheets of wallboard; panel strip. |
[splat] | a sound made by splattering or slapping. |
| splat 1 (splāt) n. A slat of wood, as one in the middle of a chair back. [Perhaps from Middle English splatten, to split open, perhaps from Medieval Latin splattāre, of Low German origin.] |
| splat 2 (splāt) n. A smacking or splashing noise. adv. With a smacking or splashing noise: landed splat on the floor. [Imitative.] |
splat
1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.
2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (ASCII 35).
3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a Mac (same as alt).
4. An obsolete name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for "tensor product".
5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character.
See also ASCII.
[The Jargon File]
(1995-01-19)