d(isk) o(perating) s(ystem)
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Decart has two main business lines, the fastest-growing of which is known as the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 18, 2026
Its Basic programming language and DOS operating system weren’t innovative in the market—but became standards.
From Barron's ● Mar. 13, 2026
They called it JAWS, which stands for Job Access With Speech, but is also a playful reference to another DOS screen reader called Flipper, like the dolphin in an eponymous 1960s TV show.
From The Verge ● Jul. 14, 2022
In the late 1990s, I was kindly, patiently coaxing senior colleagues off text-based DOS terminals and onto graphics-based Windows operating systems, wondering why they were resisting change that would make their jobs easier.
From Washington Post ● May 26, 2022
On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over an ill-behaved application which bypasses the very interrupts the screen saver watches for activity.
From The Jargon File, Version 4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000 by Steele, Guy L.
Unlike , DoS takes into account the constraints inferred from the current polymorphism, distinguishing negative, neutral and adaptive selection.
From Nature ● Feb. 8, 2012
We also computed the direction of selection, DoS, which is positive with adaptive selection, zero under neutrality and negative when weakly deleterious or new nearly neutral mutations are segregating.
From Nature ● Feb. 8, 2012
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
