Wordnet 3.0
NOUN (1)
1.
a book containing models of good penmanship;
used in teaching penmanship;
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
copybook \copybook\ n.
a book containing models of good penmanship; used in teaching
penmanship.
[WordNet 1.5] copycat
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
copybook
n 1: a book containing models of good penmanship; used in
teaching penmanship
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
copybook
copy member
copy module
(Or "copy member", "copy module") A
common piece of source code designed to be copied into many
source programs, used mainly in IBM DOS mainframe
programming.
In mainframe DOS (DOS/VS, DOS/VSE, etc.), the copybook
was stored as a "book" in a source library. A library was
comprised of "books", prefixed with a letter designating the
language, e.g., A.name for Assembler, C.name for Cobol, etc.,
because DOS didn't support multiple libraries, private
libraries, or anything. This term is commonly used by COBOL
programmers but is supported by most mainframe languages.
The IBM OS series did not use the term "copybook", instead
it referred to such files as "libraries" implemented as
"partitioned data sets" or PDS.
Copybooks are functionally equivalent to C and C++
include files.
(1997-07-31)