boot

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: OE. bot, bote, advantage, amends, cure, AS. bōt; akin to Icel. bōt, Sw. bot, Dan. bod, Goth. bōta, D. boete, G. busse; prop., a making good or better, from the root of E. better, adj. √255.

1. Remedy; relief; amends; reparation; hence, one who brings relief.

He gaf the sike man his boote.— Geoffrey Chaucer

Thou art boot for many a bruise And healest many a wound.— Sir Walter Scott

Next her Son, our soul's best boot.— William Wordsworth

2. That which is given to make an exchange equal, or to make up for the deficiency of value in one of the things exchanged.

I'll give you boot, I'll give you three for one.— William Shakespeare

3. Profit; gain; advantage; use. obsolete

Then talk no more of flight, it is no boot.— William Shakespeare

To boot, in addition; over and above; besides; as a compensation for the difference of value between things bartered.

Helen, to change, would give an eye to boot.— William Shakespeare

A man's heaviness is refreshed long before he comes to drunkenness, for when he arrives thither he hath but changed his heaviness, and taken a crime to boot.— Taylor, Jeremy

1. To profit; to advantage; to avail; — generally followed by it; as, what boots it?

What booteth it to others that we wish them well, and do nothing for them?— Richard Hooker

What subdued To change like this a mind so far imbued With scorn of man, it little boots to know.— George Noel Gordon, Ld. Byron

What boots to us your victories?— Robert Southey

2. To enrich; to benefit; to give in addition. obsolete

And I will boot thee with what gift beside Thy modesty can beg.— William Shakespeare

Origin: OE. bote, OF. bote, F. botte, LL. botta; of uncertain origin.

1. A covering for the foot and lower part of the leg, ordinarily made of leather.

2. An instrument of torture for the leg, formerly used to extort confessions, particularly in Scotland.

So he was put to the torture, which in Scotland they call the boots; for they put a pair of iron boots close on the leg, and drive wedges between them and the leg.— Bp. Gilbert Burnet

3. A place at the side of a coach, where attendants rode; also, a low outside place before and behind the body of the coach. obsolete

4. A place for baggage at either end of an old-fashioned stagecoach.

5. An apron or cover (of leather or rubber cloth) for the driving seat of a vehicle, to protect from rain and mud.

6. Plumbing The metal casing and flange fitted about a pipe where it passes through a roof.

Boot catcher, the person at an inn whose business it was to pull off boots and clean them. obsolete Jonathan Swift — Boot closer, one who, or that which, sews the uppers of boots. — Boot crimp, a frame or device used by bootmakers for drawing and shaping the body of a boot. — Boot hook, a hook with a handle, used for pulling on boots. — Boots and saddles Cavalry Tactics, the trumpet call which is the first signal for mounted drill. — Sly boots. See Slyboots, in the Vocabulary.

1. To put boots on, esp. for riding.

Coated and booted for it.— Ben Jonson

2. To punish by kicking with a booted foot. US

To boot one's self; to put on one's boots.

Booty; spoil. obsolete or rare William Shakespeare

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

<operating system, compiler> To load and initialise the operating system on a computer. Normally abbreviated to "boot". From the curious expression "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", one of the legendary feats of Baron von Munchhausen. The bootstrap loader is the program that runs on the computer before any (normal) program can run. Derived terms include reboot, cold boot, warm boot, soft boot and hard boot.

The term also applies to the use of a compiler to compile itself. The usual process is to write an interpreter for a language, L, in some other existing language. The compiler is then written in L and the interpreter is used to run it. This produces an executable for compiling programs in L from the source of the compiler in L. This technique is often used to verify the correctness of a compiler. It was first used in the LISP community.

See also My Favourite Toy Language. [Jargon File]

(2005-04-12)

The Jargon File

[techspeak; from ‘by one's bootstraps’] To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon.

The derivative reboot implies that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a bounce (sense 4) intended to clear some state of wedgitude. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: “You've lost me.” “OK, reboot. Here's the theory....”

This term is also found in the variants cold boot (from power-off condition) and warm boot (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash).

Another variant: soft boot, reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: “If you're running the mess-dos emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running.”

Opposed to this there is hard boot, which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: “I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun.” “I recommend booting it hard.” One often hard-boots by performing a power cycle.

Historical note: this term derives from bootstrap loader, a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer ‘pulled itself up by its bootstraps’ to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the ‘boot block’. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it.