What is a doco?

Question

Source: Running Linux, 5th Edition by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh (2006)

Example:

We would also like to thank the following people for their work on the Linux operat- ing system—without all of them, there wouldn’t be anything to write a book about: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Donald Becker, Alan Cox, Remy Card, Eric Ray- mond, Ted T’so, H. J. Lu, Miguel de Icaza, Ross Biro, Drew Eckhardt, Ed Carp, Eric Youngdale, Fred van Kempen, Steven Tweedie, Patrick Volkerding, Dirk Hohndel, Matthias Ettrich, and all of the other hackers, from the kernel grunts to the lowly docos, too numerous to mention here.

What does this word mean?

Yeah, 40 years in the industry and I don't recall ever hearing/seeing it, but in that context I would assume it to be short for "documentation writer", et al (and a bit pejorative, to boot). — Hot Licks, Feb 19 '17 at 13:12
Just for posterior: In my corner of the world these people (even the women) were known as "the pubs guys". — Hot Licks, Feb 20 '17 at 20:01
Doco appears to be yet another entry in the family of word shortenings that truncate a multisyllable word to its first syllable and then add an -o suffix ending, as with ammo, convo, distro, limo, and provo. For further discussion of this phenomenon, see Why is "ammunition" shortened to "ammo" and not "ammu"? — Sven Yargs, Feb 20 '17 at 22:35

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 19 '17 at 11:08

Doco seems to be a word looking for legitimization.

The word in the question context would mean ‘documentation writer’. The word has not yet established a general or usual meaning in English. This is how dictionary.com defines the relevant meaning:

Doco noun, jargon

(In-house jargon at Symbolics) A documentation writer.
See also devo and mango.

(UK) A short technical document. A "doco" is often not the documentation passed to management.
Compare doc.

What is a doco?

1 Answers1