1. [n]  a slat of wood in the middle of the back of a straight chair
2. [n]  a single splash; "he heard a splat as it hit the floor"
3. [v]  flatten on impact; "The snowballs splatted on the trees"
4. [v]  split open and flatten for cooking, as of fish over an open fire
5. [v]  give off the sound of a bullet flattening on impact

1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.

2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (ASCII 35).

3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a Mac (same as alt).

4. An obsolete name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for "tensor product".

5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character.

See also ASCII.

[Jargon File]