punt

Punt (pnt), ancient land S of Egypt accessible by way of the Red Sea. Its exact location has not been identified, but it probably included the Somali coast. Temple reliefs at Deir el Bahari in W Thebes depict an Egyptian expedition to Punt in the reign of Hatshepsut. From Punt the Egyptians obtained slaves, as well as gold and incense.

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Punt

In ancient Egyptian and Greek geography, the southern coast of the Red Sea and adjacent coasts of the Gulf of Aden, corresponding to modern coastal Ethiopia and Djibouti. Visited by Egyptian expeditions as early as 2200 BC, it was a place of ancient legend and fable and Egypt's source for incense, ivory, and ostrich feathers. During the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, an expedition was sent to Punt, and the queen had the details of the journey recorded on the walls of the Deir el-Bahri temple near Thebes. Only in the late 4th century BC were the trade routes to Punt opened to the Greeks.

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punt¹

an open flat-bottomed boat with square ends, propelled by a pole

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punt²

a kick in certain sports, such as rugby, in which the ball is released and kicked before it hits the ground

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punt³ Chiefly Brit

1. a gamble or bet, esp against the bank, as in roulette, or on horses

2. a person who bets

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punt⁴

(formerly) the Irish pound

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punt - (From the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!") 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is - we'll punt that for now." 4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the run-time system."