Meaning of black hole | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A place of punitive confinement; a lockup or cell; a military guardroom.
2. A region of spacetime that exerts a gravitational pull strong enough that no matter or energy, not even light, can escape it.
3. A void into which things disappear for good; an inscrutable area or subject.
   figuratively
4. A dangerous optical illusion that can occur on a nighttime approach with dark, featureless terrain between the aircraft and a brightly-lit runway, where the aircraft appears to the pilots to be higher up than it actually is, potentially triggering a premature or overly-steep descent and a crash short of the runway.
5. A place where incoming traffic is silently discarded.
   Internet, attributive, often
6. A bit bucket; a place of permanent oblivion for data.

Equivalents

Examples

“‘I will convince you that I do know [my duty] by clapping you for the remainder of the night into the black hole, young gentleman, do you see, and have no doubt but the air of that agreeable apartment will restore your senses.’”

“A discipline of unlimited autocracy, upheld by rods, and ferules, and the black hole.”

“The 3rd degree of punishment or confinement to the black-hole, is, according to the Articles of War, not to be for more than eight days, without the sentence of a court-martial. No Soldier, except the Commanding Officer of the regiment permits or orders it, can be confined in the black-hole. Serjeants are never to be so, but in lieu to their rooms; Corporals are never to be confined in the same prison with Privates and Buglers, and they will retain their dresses unturned; they will also receive their allowance of provisions there. When a Private or Bugler is ordered to the black-hole, the Serjeant of his squad is to take him, with his undress jacket turned, to the Master Taylor, who is to sew the letter C, in black cloth on the back of his jacket, for which the offender will be charged the sum of 3d. by the Master Taylor and Quarter Master against his company. If any overplus ensue from the confined man's charge in the expence of this cloth letter, it will be lodged in the regimental charity fund. All Privates and Buglers confined in the black hole are to be fed on bread and water, to be taken out occasionally for drill, and re-lodged immediately after. The Officer or Non-commissioned Officer who commands the guard is responsible.”

“Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects.”

“you'll have to love U.S. District Court Judge John Kane's decision to keep Denver-based Exactis.com out of an Internet black hole.... MAPS maintains a database of Internet addresses that it believes send or relay spam. It’s called the "Realtime Blackhole List"”

“2004 November 16, Jenifer Hanen, “How I fell down an Internet Black Hole....”, Black Phoebe, at www.blackphoebe.com https://web.archive.org/web/20061017203928/http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/archives/2004/11/how_i_fell_down.html I finished some client work and gave myself 30 minutes to fall down one of my favorite internet black holes: genealogical research. Four hours plus some later, my eyes were burning in my head”

“Julien Pain, head of the Internet desk at Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group which tracks censorship around the world, put it more bluntly. “It is by far the worst Internet black hole,” he said.”

“In fact, with regards to spoken language, what we were looking at was a rather large black hole in the data, and hence was born the AOT method.”

“The initial forecast about future demand for main line rail travel that has been made by the DfT is that volume is not expected to grow in the immediate future beyond 80% of the pre COVID-19 level, leaving an annual £2 billion revenue black hole compared to earlier financial forecasts.”

“One way of fighting spam is to use a blackhole list maintained on a blackhole server.”

CEFR level