From WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) [wn]:
pumpkin
n 1: a coarse vine widely cultivated for its non-keeping large
pulpy round orange fruit with firm orange skin and
numerous seeds; subspecies of Cucurbita pepo include the
summer squashes and a few autumn squashes [syn: {pumpkin
vine}, autumn pumpkin, Cucurbita pepo]
2: usually large pulpy deep-yellow round fruit of the squash
family maturing in late summer or early autumn
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Pumpkin \Pump"kin\, n. [For older pompion, pompon, OF. pompon,
L. pepo, peponis, Gr. ?, properly, cooked by the sun, ripe,
mellow; -- so called because not eaten till ripe. Cf. Cook,
n.] (Bot.)
A well-known trailing plant (Cucurbita pepo) and its fruit,
-- used for cooking and for feeding stock; a pompion.
[1913 Webster]
Pumpkin seed.
(a) The flattish oval seed of the pumpkin.
(b) (Zool.) The common pondfish.
[1913 Webster]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 Sep 2003) [foldoc]:
pumpkin
<jargon> A humourous term for the token - the object
(notional or real) that gives its possessor (the "pumpking" or
the "pumpkineer") exclusive access to something, e.g. applying
patches to a master copy of source (for which the pumpkin
is called a "patch pumpkin").
Chip Salzenberg <chip@perl.com> wrote:
David Croy once told me once that at a previous job, there was
one tape drive and multiple systems that used it for backups.
But instead of some high-tech exclusion software, they used a
low-tech method to prevent multiple simultaneous backups: a
stuffed pumpkin. No one was allowed to make backups unless
they had the "backup pumpkin".
(1999-02-23)