The Jargon File is a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang, the maintained primary lexicon of the programming subculture. The file describes itself as “a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.” It is not a dictionary written about hackers by outsiders; it is a document written by hackers about themselves, and it has been maintained by them since the early 1970s.
The file grew out of the shared culture of the early time-sharing research labs. Its preface records that the collection began at Stanford in 1975, drew heavily on the slang of the MIT and Stanford AI labs, the PDP-10 culture, and similar communities, and was passed around the ARPANET as a living text that anyone connected to that world could add to. The entries cover technical jargon, in-jokes, naming conventions, and capsule cultural history all in one place.
In print the File has appeared under more than one title. An early edition was published as “The Hacker’s Dictionary,” and a substantially expanded edition edited by Eric Raymond was published as “The New Hacker’s Dictionary.” Raymond has been the File’s principal maintainer in its modern online form, the version hosted at catb.org, while stressing that the work remains a community artifact rather than a single author’s invention.
Because it is written from inside the culture, the Jargon File is a primary source on how programmers talked and thought. Entries like “kludge,” “foo” and “bar,” “yak shaving,” and “hacker” itself are not neutral definitions but cultural self-portraits, complete with etymologies, usage examples, and editorial asides. The File records the meaning of “hacker” that the community defends: a clever and enthusiastic builder, not a computer criminal.
The File is also notable for documenting its own values. It defines and points to the hacker ethic, traces the lineage of the MIT and Stanford labs, and preserves jokes and traditions that would otherwise have vanished with the machines that hosted them. As a maintained, openly shared, hacker-authored lexicon, it stands as both a reference work and an artifact of the culture it describes.
Reading the Jargon File is one of the most direct ways to understand the texture of early programming culture: the playfulness, the precision about language, and the insistence that the word “hacker” is a badge of skill and curiosity rather than a synonym for intruder.