foobar

Another common metasyntactic variable; see foo. Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense.

According to a german correspondent, the term was coined during WW2 by allied troops who could not pronounce the german word "furchtbar" (horrible, terrible, awful).

[Jargon File]

(2003-07-03)

Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)