wombat

Noun

WordNet 3.0

Noun (1)

burrowing herbivorous Australian marsupials about the size of a badger

Webster's Dictionary (GCIDE)

Wombat \Wom"bat\, n. [From the native name, womback, wombach, in Australia.] (Zool.) Any one of three species of Australian burrowing marsupials of the genus Phascolomys, especially the common species (Phascolomys ursinus). They are nocturnal in their habits, and feed mostly on roots. [1913 Webster]

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

WOMBAT

Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.

Problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as "wrestling with a wombat".

See also crawling horror, SMOP. [Jargon File]

(1995-03-10)

wombat

1.<programming> A metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth Hackish.

2.<computer> wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk. [Jargon File]

(1995-03-10)

The Jargon File

WOMBAT /wom'bat/, adj.

[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as wrestling with a wombat. See also crawling horror, SMOP. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth Hackish.

Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file responded to “HELP WOMBAT” with factual information about Real World wombats.