pumpking

pump·king
P3U1M3P3K5I1N1G2
UK/ˈpʌm(p)kɪŋ/US/ˈpʌm(p)ˌkɪŋ/

noun

A Perl user working on shared source code who has been temporarily designated as the only person who is allowed to make changes.

First used late 20th c.Scrabble 19

Meanings

nounpumpking (plural pumpkings)

plural pumpkings

  1. slangcomputingA Perl user working on shared source code who has been temporarily designated as the only person who is allowed to make changes.First known use late 20th c.

    In addition, various people are pumpkings for different areas. For example, Andy Dougherty and Jarkko Hietaniemi share the Configure pumpkin, and Tom Christiansen is the documentation pumpking.

    1999 winter, Nathan Torkington, “Hacking the Perl Core”, in The Perl Journal, volume 4, number 4 (number 16 overall), Boston, Mass.: Readable Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 31 Oct 2020
    3 more examples

    Releases are coordinated by a ‘patch pumpkin holder’, or ‘pumpking’ – a quality controller who, with help from Larry [Wall], decides which contributions make the grade and when and bears the heavy responsibility of releasing a new Perl.

    2000, Simon Cozens, with Peter Wainwright, Beginning Perl, Birmingham, West Midlands: Wrox Press, →ISBN, page 24

    Each release of Perl is assigned a "pumpking." This person controls all changes to the actual source code of the language itself. The pumpking for 5.6 was Gurusamy Sarathy, and the pumpking for 5.8 is Jarkko Hietaniemi.

    2002, Clinton Pierce, “Basic Perl”, in Charlotte Clapp, editor, Perl Developer’s Dictionary, Indianapolis, Ind.: Sams Publishing, →ISBN, page 6

    Thanks to Doug Miles, the Phoenix Perl Mongers Pumpking, for his tireless dedication to the Phoenix Perl community, which he brought together. Writing Perl in the valley would be a lot lonelier without his hard work.

    2005, Scott Walters, Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (Expert’s Voice in Open Source), Berkeley, Calif.: Apress, →ISBN, page xxii

Origin

Blend of pumpkin + king, anecdotally from the use of a stuffed pumpkin toy that was handed between employees as a token of permission to make changes, ensuring that only one person could make changes at any particular time.

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

pumpking. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pumpking

MLA

“pumpking.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pumpking. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “pumpking,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pumpking.

Source: pumpking on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.