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G

<g>
Chat shorthand for "grin". Used either to show that you are amused or to say, "Don't take what I said too seriously." The latter usage can prevent misunderstandings!

ga
Chat shorthand for "go ahead", frequently used to signify that the person is through typing.

GIF
Graphical Interchange Format. A bitmap graphical format originally developed for CompuServe that is widely used in WWW pages. It is particularly good for text art, cartoon art, poster art, and line drawings- -all types with solid colors and distinct lines or borders between different colors. GIF files use a .gif extension. See also animated GIF, transparent GIF and JPEG.

GMT
Greenwich Mean Time, often used as a standard time zone. In e-mail headers, you will often see references to the hours offset from GMT. For example, Eastern Standard Time is GMT minus 5 hours because of the 5 hour difference between Greenwich, England and the Eastern US.

gmta
Chat shorthand for "great minds think alike".

gopher
A friendly menu system for exploring the Internet developed at the University of Minnesota. Few gophers exist since the growth of the World Wide Web.

GPF
General Protection Fault. The curse of Windows! See our GPF Guide, How to Avoid GPF's While Browsing the Nets.

grep
A unix search command that will search for matching text or a "regular expression" (regexp) in a file. It derives from the initial characters of Global Regular Expression Print.

griefer
An online game role player who sabotages the game by harassing, deceiving, cheating, robbing or killing newer players.

GUI
Graphical User Interface. Pronounced "gooey". An operating system interface between the user and the computer based on graphics. GUIs typically use a mouse or other tracking device and icons. First developed by XEROX as an easier to learn interface than text-based ones, it was adopted by Apple for the Macintosh, Microsoft for Windows, and even for unix systems as XWindows.

GUID
Globally Unique Identifier. A controversial 16-byte number generated by Microsoft programs that uniquely identifies a network or user or computer or document. It is one of the elements of information that can be passed when you connect to an Internet site, and it may be stored in cookies.