fat

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: See Vat, noun

1. A large tub, cistern, or vessel; a vat. obsolete

The fats shall overflow with wine and oil.— Joel ii. 24.

2. A measure of quantity, differing for different commodities. obsolete Hebert, Luke

Origin: AS. fǣtt; akin to D. vet, G. fett, feist, Icel. feitr, Sw. fet, Dan. fed, and perh. to Gr. πῖδαξ spring, fountain, πιδύειν to gush forth, πίων fat, Skr. pi to swell.

1. Abounding with fat; as: (a) Fleshy; characterized by fatness; plump; corpulent; not lean; as, a fat man; a fat ox. (b) Oily; greasy; unctuous; rich; — said of food.

2. Exhibiting the qualities of a fat animal; coarse; heavy; gross; dull; stupid.

Making our western wits fat and mean.— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make the heart of this people fat.— Is. vi. 10.

3. Fertile; productive; as, a fat soil; a fat pasture.

4. Rich; producing a large income; desirable; as, a fat benefice; a fat office; a fat job.

Now parson of Troston, a fat living in Suffolk.— Thomas Carlyle

5. Abounding in riches; affluent; fortunate. obsolete

Persons grown fat and wealthy by long impostures.— Jonathan Swift

6. Typog. Of a character which enables the compositor to make large wages; — said of matter containing blank, cuts, or many leads, etc.; as, a fat take; a fat page.

Fat lute, a mixture of pipe clay and oil for filling joints.

1. Physiol. Chem. An oily liquid or greasy substance making up the main bulk of the adipose tissue of animals, and widely distributed in the seeds of plants. See Adipose tissue, under Adipose.

☞ Animal fats are composed mainly of three distinct fats, tristearin, tripalmitin, and triolein, mixed in varying proportions. As olein is liquid at ordinary temperatures, while the other two fats are solid, it follows that the consistency or hardness of fats depends upon the relative proportion of the three individual fats. During the life of an animal, the fat is mainly in a liquid state in the fat cells, owing to the solubility of the two solid fats in the more liquid olein at the body temperature. Chemically, fats are composed of fatty acid, as stearic, palmitic, oleic, etc., united with glyceryl. In butter fat, olein and palmitin predominate, mixed with another fat characteristic of butter, butyrin. In the vegetable kingdom many other fats or glycerides are to be found, as myristin from nutmegs, a glyceride of lauric acid in the fat of the bay tree, etc.

2. The best or richest productions; the best part; as, to live on the fat of the land.

3. Typog. Work. containing much blank, or its equivalent, and, therefore, profitable to the compositor.

Fat acid. Chemistry See Sebacic acid, under Sebacic. — Fat series, Fatty series Chemistry, the series of the paraffine hydrocarbons and their derivatives; the marsh gas or methane series. — Natural fats Chemistry, the group of oily substances of natural occurrence, as butter, lard, tallow, etc., as distinguished from certain fatlike substance of artificial production, as paraffin. Most natural fats are essentially mixtures of triglycerides of fatty acids.

Origin: OE. fatten, AS. fǣttian. See Fat, adjective, and cf. Fatten.

To make fat; to fatten; to make plump and fleshy with abundant food; as, to fat fowls or sheep.

We fat all creatures else to fat us.— William Shakespeare

To grow fat, plump, and fleshy.

An old ox fats as well, and is as good, as a young one.— John Mortimer

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

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

<file system> (FAT) The component of an MS-DOS or Windows 95 file system which describes the files, directories, and free space on a hard disk or floppy disk.

A disk is divided into partitions. Under the FAT file system each partition is divided into clusters, each of which can be one or more sectors, depending on the size of the partition. Each cluster is either allocated to a file or directory or it is free (unused). A directory lists the name, size, modification time and starting cluster of each file or subdirectory it contains.

At the start of the partition is a table (the FAT) with one entry for each cluster. Each entry gives the number of the next cluster in the same file or a special value for "not allocated" or a special value for "this is the last cluster in the chain". The first few clusters after the FAT contain the root directory.

The FAT file system was originally created for the CP/M[?] operating system where files were catalogued using 8-bit addressing. MS DOS's FAT allows only 8.3 filenames.

With the introduction of MS-DOS 4 an incompatible 16-bit FAT (FAT16) with 32-kilobyte clusters was introduced that allowed partitions of up to 2 gigabytes.

Microsoft later created FAT32 to support partitions larger than two gigabytes and pathnames greater that 256 characters. It also allows more efficient use of disk space since clusters are four kilobytes rather than 32 kilobytes. FAT32 was first available in OEM Service Release 2 of Windows 95 in 1996. It is not fully backward compatible with the 16-bit and 8-bit FATs.

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Compare: NTFS.

[How big is a FAT? Is the term used outside MS DOS? How long is a FAT16 filename?]

(2000-02-05)