Word.ws English Dictionary

Squiggol

Squiggol proper noun: the Bird–Meertens formalism.

Proper noun

Squiggol

  1. (humorous, functional programming) The Bird–Meertens formalism.
    • The overall goal of Squiggol is to calculate programs from their specifications in the way a mathematician calculates solutions to differential equations, or uses arithmetic to solve numerical problems.1991 June, Erik Meijer, Maarten Fokkinga, Ross Paterson, “Functional programming with bananas, lenses, envelopes and barbed wire”, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Functional programming...

Origin of Squiggol

Blend of squiggly + ALGOL, from the “squiggly” symbols it uses.

Questions about Squiggol

What does Squiggol mean?
Squiggol means the Bird–Meertens formalism.
What part of speech is Squiggol?
Squiggol is a proper noun.

Words near Squiggol in the dictionary

  1. squigglies
  2. squiggliest
  3. squiggliness
  4. squiggling
  5. squiggly
  6. Squiggol
  7. squigs
  8. squigs out
  9. squilgee
  10. squilgeed
  11. squilgeeing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Squiggol (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Squiggol.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/squiggol. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.