notebook
Pluralnotebooks
- 1A bound book with pages for writing notes and memoranda.
The detective filled an entire notebook with observations from the case.
Students kept their lecture notes in spiral notebooks all semester.
Similarnotepad
Note
A plain compound of note and book, and the sense the computing meanings borrow from. Shakespeare already uses it in Julius Caesar (1599), spelled Note-booke. Cassius complains that his faults are set in one, learned and conned by rote, to be cast in his teeth. Notepad and writing pad are close synonyms, and by-book and rough book belong to the same family.
- 2Short for notebook computer.
He closed his notebook and packed it into his bag before the flight.
The company issued each engineer a notebook for remote work.
Note
A clipping that keeps the modifier and drops computer. The name began as a size claim: a notebook computer was a laptop roughly the footprint of a paper notebook with A4 or letter-sized pages. Corey Sandler's Upgrading and Fixing Laptops For Dummies (2006) observes that the gap between laptops and notebooks shrank to an inch or two, so the two words came to name nearly the same machine.
- 3An interactive interface used in literate programming that lets you mix runnable calculations with readable comments, diagrams, and similar content.
The researcher shared a notebook combining her analysis code with written commentary.
Each notebook cell can display a plot right beneath the code that generated it.
Note
A programmer's borrowing of the paper notebook: one document where working and commentary sit side by side. It is often named for the software that runs it, as in Jupyter notebooks, and it is sometimes used attributively, as in a notebook interface. Ming, Glasser and Hildebrandt's Attainable Region Theory (2016) values it for sharing code reproducibly in a form easier to update than a static CD-ROM.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from note plus book.