pipe

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: AS. pīpe, probably fr. L. pipare, pipire, to chirp; of imitative origin. Cf. Peep, Pibroch, Fife.

1. A wind instrument of music, consisting of a tube or tubes of straw, reed, wood, or metal; any tube which produces musical sounds; as, a shepherd's pipe; the pipe of an organ. “Tunable as sylvan pipe.” John Milton

Now had he rather hear the tabor and the pipe.— William Shakespeare

2. Any long tube or hollow body of wood, metal, earthenware, or the like: especially, one used as a conductor of water, steam, gas, etc.

3. A small bowl with a hollow stem, — used in smoking tobacco, and, sometimes, other substances.

4. A passageway for the air in speaking and breathing; the windpipe, or one of its divisions.

5. The key or sound of the voice. rare William Shakespeare

6. The peeping whistle, call, or note of a bird.

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.— Alfred Tennyson

7. pl. The bagpipe; as, the pipes of Lucknow.

8. Mining An elongated body or vein of ore.

9. A roll formerly used in the English exchequer, otherwise called the Great Roll, on which were taken down the accounts of debts to the king; — so called because put together like a pipe. Mozley & W.

10. Nautical A boatswain's whistle, used to call the crew to their duties; also, the sound of it.

11. A cask usually containing two hogsheads, or 126 wine gallons; also, the quantity which it contains.

Pipe fitter, one who fits pipes together, or applies pipes, as to an engine or a building. — Pipe fitting, a piece, as a coupling, an elbow, a valve, etc., used for connecting lengths of pipe or as accessory to a pipe. — Pipe office, an ancient office in the Court of Exchequer, in which the clerk of the pipe made out leases of crown lands, accounts of cheriffs, etc. British — Pipe tree Botany, the lilac and the mock orange; — so called because their were formerly used to make pipe stems; — called also pipe privet. — Pipe wrench, or Pipe tongs, a jawed tool for gripping a pipe, in turning or holding it. — To smoke the pipe of peace, to smoke from the same pipe in token of amity or preparatory to making a treaty of peace, — a custom of the American Indians.

1. To play on a pipe, fife, flute, or other tubular wind instrument of music.

We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced.— Matt. xi. 17.

2. Nautical To call, convey orders, etc., by means of signals on a pipe or whistle carried by a boatswain.

3. To emit or have a shrill sound like that of a pipe; to whistle. “Oft in the piping shrouds.” William Wordsworth

4. Metallurgy To become hollow in the process of solodifying; — said of an ingot, as of steel.

1. To perform, as a tune, by playing on a pipe, flute, fife, etc.; to utter in the shrill tone of a pipe.

A robin... was piping a few querulous notes.— Washington Irving

2. Nautical To call or direct, as a crew, by the boatswain's whistle.

As fine a ship's company as was ever piped aloft.— Frederick Marryat

3. To furnish or equip with pipes; as, to pipe an engine, or a building.

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

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

1.<operating system> One of Unix's buffers which can be written to by one asynchronous process and read by another, with the kernel suspending and waking up the sender and receiver according to how full the pipe is. In later versions of Unix, rather than using an anonymous kernel-managed temporary file to implement a pipe, it can be named and is implemented as a local socket pair.

2.<character> "|" ASCII character 124. Used to represent a pipe between two processes in a shell command line. E.g.

grep foo log | more

which feeds the output of grep into the input of more without requiring a named temporary file and without waiting for the first process to finish.

3.<jargon, networking> A connection to a network.

See also light pipe.

(1996-09-24)

The Jargon File

[common] Idiomatically, one's connection to the Internet; in context, the expansion “bit pipe” is understood. A “fat pipe” is a line with T1 or higher capacity. A person with a 28.8 modem might be heard to complain “I need a bigger pipe”.