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daemon love

daemon

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Computers A program or process that runs in the background but remains inactive until invoked.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • etc. See demon, etc.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • See demon, demonic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun computing, Unix A process (a running program) that does not have a controlling terminal.
  • noun A demon.
  • noun Greek mythology A lesser deity between men and gods.
  • noun One's inner spirit or daimon.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an evil supernatural being
  • noun a person who is part mortal and part god

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Sense 3, after Maxwell's demon (from the creature's constant monitoring of gas molecules going in and out of an aperture ).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Maxwell's demon; a derivation from "disk and execution monitor" is generally considered a backronym.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek δαίμων (daimon, "a god, goddess, divine power, genius, guardian spirit"), from δαίω (daio, "to divide, to distribute destinies, to allot").

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Examples

  • "The daemon shall not choose us, _but we shall choose our daemon_." [

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 23, September, 1859 Various

  • Personally, I am convinced that my daemon is a raccoon, too curious for her own good and always into stuff.

    Androne here Roger Sutton 2007

  • A brief synopsis: A brilliant game designer has recently passed away and upon his death, an unknown daemon is loosed upon an unsuspecting world.

    REVIEW: Daemon by Daniel Suarez 2009

  • My daemon is a speed-reader that leaps before looking.

    Androne here Roger Sutton 2007

  • By the way, they told me that my daemon is modest ....

    Androne here Roger Sutton 2007

  • But just as the horror of a daemonless boy would be nothing without the buildup of what a daemon is in the first place (you've read HDM, right?), the constant beating-you-over-the-head with the formula is necessary to appreciate what happens when the formula, bit by bit, begins to break down.

    Contest At Readable Feast 2006

  • Just as the appearance of the daemonless boy near the end of The Golden Compass wouldn't carry nearly so much horror if we hadn't been so entrenched in daemon-hood up until that point, I think that the formulaic content of the first six Snicket books - a major point of criticism - is absolutely essential to the disorienting effect of watching the formula, bit by bit, dissolve in later books.

    A Series of Unfortunate Events 2006

  • A syslog daemon is a UNIX application that handles requests across the network.

    LogToSyslog 2001

  • Friday, June 06, 2008 11: 57 PM by Kirk hi Scott - is there any support for using Silverlight 2 for a web service or "daemon" - like service (i.e. Windows service, but on other platforms)? as more things get stuffed into Silverlight, it seems to makes it a better.

    ScottGu's Blog 2008

  • OK, very quickly, a daemon is your animal companion but like a soul in animal form.

    Pullman's Progress 2008

Comments

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  • uselessness commented on the word daemon

    Is it pronounced demon or damon? I always mumble the first syllable when I have to say it aloud.

    May 10, 2007

  • treeseed commented on the word daemon

    The words daemon, dæmon, are Latinized spellings of the Greek δαίμων (daimon), used purposely today to distinguish the daemons of Ancient Greek religion, good or malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes" (see Plato's Symposium), from the Judeo-Christian usage demon, a malignant spirit that can seduce, afflict, or possess humans.

    _Wikipedia

    February 6, 2008

  • milosrdenstvi commented on the word daemon

    Conversation I had working IT:

    Guy: I got this problem, I keep getting these emails.

    Me: Emails?

    Guy: Yeah, and I can't understand a word of them, they're all letters and numbers all jumbled up, can't make head nor tail of them.

    Me: So where are you getting these emails from?

    Guy: I don't know, they're all from a guy named Damon. I don't know who he is, I thought maybe he worked with you guys.

    Me: Damon?

    Guy: Yeah, Mailer Daemon. You know him?

    Me: Ohhhhh! That's not Damon, that's DEMON! That's way above my level, that means your computer's possessed. I'm just IT, you need an exorcist.

    I actually like to pronounce it as the Greek, 'daimon' with ai as in Thailand. This is actually the intermediate vowel between ay and ee, so it sounds all right for people who have been used to pronouncing it either way. This should be the general rule for all uses of the ae ligature (and oe is oi as in voice). If you have to choose something else, however, I'd take demon.

    August 19, 2008

  • ithinkitisayit commented on the word daemon

    It's pronounce demon. I say dameon, though. It's considered your soul, or your consciousness. What separates man from animal. At least, that's the definition by His Dark Materials standard.

    February 4, 2009

  • TankHughes commented on the word daemon

    According to 1999 Wired Style, they made daemon into the backronym "Disk And Execution MONitor."

    August 31, 2016

  • alexz commented on the word daemon

    shows up in the Jargon file in the 1983 version.

    http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.5.0.dos.txt

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File#1975_to_1983

    Jargon file has it listed as pronounced either way.. dee-mn or day-mn

    September 1, 2016