look-up
(ˈlʊkʌp)
[f. vbl. phr. to look up (see look v. 45).]
1. A call, a visit. rare.
| 1855 D. G. Rossetti Let. 25 Nov. (1965) I. 278 Hughes..gave them a look up about it. 1888 ‘R. Boldrewood’ Robbery under Arms I. xiv. 191 We foraged up Aileen's mare, and made it up to ride over to George Storefield's, and gave him a look-up. |
2. The action of (or a facility for) looking something up in a dictionary, file, etc.; retrieval of information about items in an ordered collection. Freq. attrib.
| 1948 Math. Tables & Other Aids to Computation III. 157 Operations such as division, square root, table look-up, etc., where the required time cannot be predicted. 1958 A. D. Booth in Aspects of Translation 88 All that had been produced was a programme which would enable a computing machine to perform look-up operations which a human translator would perform with a dictionary. 1960 E. Delavenay Introd. Machine Transl. vi. 93 An appreciable amount of time will thus be saved in dictionary look-up. 1964 Discovery Oct. 55/1 The programme does this in several stages: (1) a dictionary look-up which provides information about parts of speech, [etc.]. 1967 Cox & Grose Organiz. Bibliogr. Rec. by Computer iv. 79 These citations are then found in the main file by a ‘look-up’ procedure. 1971 A. J. Aitken in R. A. Wisbey Computer in Lit. & Ling. Res. 14 In addition, TLF also has a computer ‘look-up’ which in effect lists certain predictable collocations of certain common function words so that the computer can subdivide its examples according to these collocations. |