dashboard

Pluraldashboards

Formsdashboards, dashboarding, dashboarded

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A panel below a vehicle's or aircraft's windshield that houses gauges and compartments and may also have controls and indicator lights.

   The pilot scanned the dashboard for the altimeter reading before takeoff.

   A cracked dashboard can be surprisingly expensive to replace in older cars.

   Similarfascia

   Note

   The carriage's mud screen moved indoors and kept its name, though nothing splashes this panel now; the story of the word is told under the horse-drawn screen. A familiar compound is dashboard light, the glow of the gauges in a dark car, made memorable by Jim Steinman's 1977 song "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A graphical user interface through which a user changes an application's settings.

   The administrator configured user permissions from the dashboard.

   Each dashboard exposes only the settings relevant to that team.

   Similarconsole

   Note

   Software borrowed the word for the screen where you change things rather than merely watch them. In games and web services alike, you log in to the dashboard, and that is where account and application settings live. Keep it apart from the personalized feed: that dashboard shows what others have posted, while this one shows what you can adjust.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A website user's personalized feed showing recent updates from the pages they have used or followed.

   New comments on her projects appeared at the top of the dashboard.

   The dashboard collects every update from the blogs he subscribes to.

   Similarfeed, timeline

   Note

   A stream you scroll rather than a panel you consult: the verb that keeps company with this sense is scroll, as in scrolling down my dashboard or absently scrolling through my dashboard. Tumblr users made the word familiar for a feed of reblogged posts from followed blogs, and it is nearly always possessive: my dashboard, your dashboard.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To organize information into a dashboard format that presents it together in one place.

   Analysts dashboard the quarterly metrics to spot trends quickly.

   They wanted to dashboard every key indicator on a single screen.

5. 5
   nounhistoricalcountable

   An upturned screen of wood or leather mounted at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh, protecting the driver from mud, water, and snow thrown up by the horse's hooves.

   The coachman crouched behind the dashboard to escape the spray from the muddy road.

   A leather dashboard kept the worst of the splatter off her traveling coat.

   Note

   A splash guard named for its job: the board took what the hooves dashed up, in the older sense of dash meaning "to sprinkle, to splatter." The word belongs to the history of coaching, so a modern reader usually needs a carriage or sleigh in the sentence to avoid picturing the panel in a car, which seems to have inherited the name later.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   One of the boards mounted around a paddle wheel that push against the water to propel the vessel.

   The engineer replaced a cracked dashboard on the steamer's paddle wheel.

   As the wheel turned, every dashboard bit into the water and drove the boat upstream.

   Similarpaddle, float

   Note

   In paddle-steamer vocabulary, dashboard and float name the same part. Float here does not mean something buoyant; it is the term for one of the flat boards set around the wheel's rim, each striking the water in turn. A dashboard is replaced or repaired as a single board, never as the whole wheel.

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