Meaning of fork | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Any of several types of pronged (tined) tools (physical tools), as follows:
2. A utensil with spikes used to put solid food into the mouth, or to hold food down while cutting, or for serving food.
3. The bottom of a sump into which the water of a mine drains.
4. Any of several types of pronged tools for use on farms, in fields, or in the garden or lawn, such as a smaller hand fork for weeding or a larger one for turning over the soil.
5. bearer; holder
6. Such a pronged tool having a long straight handle, generally for two-handed use, as used for digging, lifting, mucking, pitching, etc.
7. A tuning fork.
8. A fork in the road, as follows:
   physical
9. An intersection in a road or path where one road is split into two.
   physical
10. A decision point.
    figuratively
11. A point where a waterway, such as a river or other stream, splits and flows into two (or more) different directions.
12. One of the parts into which anything is furcated or divided; a prong; a branch of a stream, a road, etc.; a barbed point, as of an arrow.
    metonymically
13. A point in time where one has to make a decision between two life paths.
    figuratively
14. Either of the (figurative) paths thus taken.
    figuratively, metonymically
15. (software development, content management, data management) A departure from having a single source of truth (SSOT), sometimes intentionally but usually unintentionally.
    figuratively, metonymically
16. Any of the pieces/versions (of software, content, or data sets) thus created.
    figuratively, metonymically
17. The launch of one or more separate software development efforts based upon a modified copy of an existing project, especially in free and open-source software.
    figuratively
18. Any of the software projects resulting from the launch of such separate software development efforts based upon a copy of the original project.
    figuratively
19. The splitting of the coverage of a topic (within a corpus of content) into two or more pieces.
    figuratively
20. Any of the pieces/versions of content thus created.
    figuratively
21. A split in a blockchain resulting from protocol disagreements, or a branch of the blockchain resulting from such a split.
    figuratively
22. The simultaneous attack of two adversary pieces with one single attacking piece (especially a knight).
23. The crotch.
    British, vulgar
24. A forklift.
    colloquial
25. Either of the blades of a forklift (or, in plural, the set of blades), on which the goods to be raised are loaded.
26. In a bicycle or motorcycle, the portion of the frameset holding the front wheel, allowing the rider to steer and balance, also called front fork.
27. The upper front brow of a saddle bow, connected in the tree by the two saddle bars to the cantle on the other end.
28. A set of data associated with an individual file in some file systems.
29. A gallows.
    obsolete

Equivalents

Examples

“a thunderbolt with three forks”

“this fork of the river dries up during droughts”

“LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.”

“A content fork may be intentional (as from a schism about goals) or unintentional (merely from a lack of reorganizing, so far).”

“Known as a “fork”, the new version of bitcoin (dubbed Bitcoin XT) would support more transactions per hour, at the cost of increasing the amount of memory required to hold a full database of all the bitcoin transactions throughout history, known as the blockchain.”

“Are you qualified to drive a fork?”

“Get those forks tilted back more or you're gonna lose that pallet!”

“The fork can be equipped with a suspension on mountain bikes.”

“resource fork”

“HFS+ uses forks to store file data. Generally there are two types of forks available in HFS+, the data fork and the resource fork.”

“They had run through all punishments, and just 'scaped the fork”

CEFR level