queue
/kjuː
/noun
1chiefly British A line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.Upon the group's return a queue of vehicles had lined up to go across the river....
- As queues of people lined up in a typical British orderly fashion, traffic on the North Circular began to build up, with punters travelling from as far as Birmingham to get their hands on a cheap deal.
- Vehicles previously stuck in queues past the A2 junction suddenly speed up and try to get the best position as three lanes expand to eight for the toll booths.
Synonyms
line, row, column, file, chain, string, stream;
procession, train, succession, progression, cavalcade, sequence, series;
waiting list, reserve list;
North American breadline, wait list, backup, waiting line
British informal crocodile
traffic jam, jam, tailback, line, stream, gridlock
informal snarl-up, traffic snarl
2 Computing A list of data items, commands, etc., stored so as to be retrievable in a definite order, usually the order of insertion.A bitmap indicates which queues are not empty, and the individual queues are FIFO lists....
- If there are no independent commands in the queue at all, the FPU unit will be idling for 5 clocks.
- When packets are dropped this way, a new entry is stored in a special queue of unresolved addresses.
3 archaic A plait of hair worn at the back.Chinese men were forced to braid their long hair into a queue or ‘pigtail’....
- For tonight, he had tied back his hair in a tidy queue, and his eyes seemed especially bright from his sapphire-colored tunic.
- His long, shoulder length hair tied in a queue, he walked toward the small stable where his horse was waiting.
verb (queues, queuing or queueing, queued)
1 [no object] chiefly British Take one’s place in a queue: in the war they had queued for food...
- Now TV stations around the world are queuing up to buy the series.
- Academics, meanwhile, have been queuing up to back fiscal autonomy.
- We need more skilled craftsmen, and yet there are young people queuing up for apprenticeships who simply cannot get them.
Synonyms
line up, stand in a queue, form a queue, queue up, wait in line, form a line, form lines, get into rows/columns, fall in, file, walk/move in line
British informal form a crocodile
1.1 (queue up) Be extremely keen to do or have something: companies are queuing up to move to the bay
2 [with object] Computing Arrange in a queue: input or output requests to a file are queued by the operating system...
- All write operations are queued to the secondary device, or the journal device, which may be disk or tape.
- When data is ready, that thread/dæmon wakes up and queues the received data for use by the consuming application threads or processes.
- Once turned on, programs are queued up for commercial scanning after the end of the show.
Origin
Late 16th century (as a heraldic term denoting the tail of an animal): from French, based on Latin cauda 'tail'. Compare with cue2. sense 1 of the noun dates from the mid 19th century.
Think of a long queue of people stretching back from a ticket office or bus stop. It looks a bit like an animal's tail, and this is the literal meaning of the word, which comes from French and was based on Latin cauda ‘tail’. Queue was originally used as a heraldic term for the tail of an animal. In the 18th and 19th centuries it also referred to a pigtail, sometimes spelt cue, and source of the long thin rod cue (mid 16th century) used in snooker. It came to describe a line of people in the mid 19th century.
Rhymes
- night office
- night of the long knives
- night op
- night operation
- night owl
- night paddock
- night parrot
- night partridge
- night-piece
- night porter
- night post
- night-rail
- night-raven
- night-rest
- nightrider
- night-riding
- night-robe
- night-runner
- night safe
- nightscape
- night scene
- night-scented
- night school
- night scope
- night-season