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Revision as of 18:39, 12 September 2002 by Isis~enwiki (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The word foobar might originate in the World War II American Army slang word fubar, which is an abbreviation of "Fucked up beyond all recognition" (describing a very bad situation, e.g., a plan that went wrong) or "... beyond all repair" (for machinery that was destroyed). Fubar was most probably influenced by the German word furchtbar which means terrible or awful.
Later, fubar might have changed to foobar, perhaps by merging it with the word foo, which is a general term of disgust and might originate in the chinese word "fu" (or "foo" 福), meaning happiness. (This is all folk etymology: nobody knows if fubar and foobar are actually related. The Jargon File, for example, gives no origin for foobar.)
Today, foobar is also used as a dummy test word in many descriptions and tutorials of programming languages, where it serves as an example text, e.g., for the division of a string into foo and bar (see metasyntactic variable). Foobar is also used in another form, fugazi, which supposedly resembles a Vietnamese word. Except in military and computer sciences/hacker communities, the word fubar had fallen out of use since the 1960s but has enjoyed another resurgence since it was used in the movie Saving Private Ryan (1998).