Peripheral \Pe*riph"er*al\, a.
1. Of or pertaining to a periphery; constituting a periphery;
peripheric.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Anat.) External; away from the center; on or near the
surface; as, the peripheral portion of the nervous system.
[1913 Webster]
3. Pertaining to minor, unimportant, superficial, or
irrelevant aspects of the matter in question; as,
peripheral isssues are dealt with in the appendix.
[PJC] Peripheric
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
peripheral
adj 1: on or near an edge or constituting an outer boundary; the
outer area; "Russia's peripheral provinces";
"peripheral suburbs" [ant: central]
2: related to the key issue but not of central importance; "a
peripheral interest"; "energy is far from a peripheral
issue in the economy"; "peripheral issues"
n : (computer science) electronic equipment connected by cable
to the CPU of a computer; "disk drives and printers are
important peripherals" [syn: computer peripheral, peripheral
device]
WordNet (r) 2.0
56 Moby Thesaurus words for "peripheral":
ambient, apparent, beside the point, circling, circumambient,
circumferential, circumflex, circumfluent, circumfluous,
circumjacent, cortical, delineatory, embracing, encircling,
enclosing, encompassing, enfolding, enveloping, environing,
epidermic, exomorphic, exterior, external, extrinsic, fringe,
in outline, incidental, inessential, irrelevant, minor,
neighboring, open, out, outer, outermost, outlined, outlying,
outmost, outside, outstanding, outward, outward-facing, perimetric,
public, roundabout, secondary, seeming, suburban, superficial,
surface, surrounding, tangential, unessential, unimportant,
unnecessary, wrapping
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
peripheral
(Or "peripheral device", "device") Any part of a
computer other than the CPU or working memory,
i.e. disks, keyboards, monitors, mice, printers,
scanners, tape drives, microphones, speakers,
cameras, to list just the less exotic ones.
High speed working memory, such as RAM, ROM or, in the
old days, core would not normally be referred to as
peripherals. The more modern term "device" is also more
general in that it is used for things such as a pseudo-tty,
a RAM drive, or a network adaptor.
Some argue that, since the advent of the personal computer,
the motherboard, hard disk, keyboard, mouse, and monitor
are all parts of the base system, and only use the term
"peripheral" for optional additional components.
(2002-09-03)
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)
computer peripheral, peripheral device
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