[win-ches-ter, -chuh-ster] 
| 1. | a city in Hampshire, in S England: cathedral; capital of the early Wessex kingdom and of medieval England. 88,700. |
| 2. | a town in E Massachusetts, near Boston. 20,701. |
| 3. | a city in N Virginia: Civil War battles 1862, 1864. 20,217. |
| 4. | a city in E central Kentucky. 15,216. |
| 5. | a town in NW Connecticut. 10,841. |
| 6. | Winchester rifle. |
| 7. | Computers. Winchester disk. |
[wes-iks] | 1. | (in the Middle Ages) a kingdom, later an earldom, in S England. Capital: Winchester. |
| 2. | the fictional setting of the novels of Thomas Hardy, principally identifiable with Dorsetshire. |
| a hard disk that is permanently mounted in its unit. |
| Win·ches·ter 1 (wĭn'chěs'tər, -chĭ-stər) A municipal borough of south-central England southwest of London. The capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, it was an important center of learning that attracted many religious scholars after the Norman Conquest (1066). Population: 41,400. |
| Win·ches·ter 2 (wĭn'chěs'tər, -chĭ-stər) A trademark used for a shoulder firearm. |
winchester hardware
An informal generic term for floating head magnetic disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion.
The name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte volumes; 30--30 became "Winchester" when somebody noticed the similarity to the common term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30 referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the charge).
[The Jargon File]
(1994-12-06)