I’ve been rereading my Harry Potter books and am running into all sorts of cool British words. Here’s one for ya….
scrum (skrm) noun
1. Sports
a. A play in Rugby in which the two sets of forwards mass together around the ball and, with their heads down, struggle to gain possession of the ball.
b. The mass or formation of players during such a play.
2. Chiefly British: A disordered or confused situation involving a number of people.
3. intransitive verb: scrummed, scrum·ming, scrums
To engage in a scrum. [Short for scrummage.]
Source:
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009.
Also, more recently:
A Scrum (noun)
An agile software development methodology developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in the mid-1990s. Scrum is based on a “Sprint,” which is typically a 30-day period for delivering a working part of the system. Each Sprint starts with a two to three-hour planning session that includes the customer (product owner), the facilitator (Scrum master) and the cross-functional team. The customer describes the highest priority in the backlog, and after the team agrees on how much of it to do, it is left alone to do it. To keep the team synchronized, there is a 15-minute meeting every day. At the end of the Sprint, the results are delivered and reviewed, and the next Sprint is started.
Source: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=Scrum&i=50946,00.asp
Ya learn somethin’ new everyday, eh?
