What is "wishbone"

Merrythought \Mer"ry*thought`\, n. The forked bone of a fowl's breast; -- called also wishbone. See Furculum.

Note: It is a sportive custom for two persons to break this bone by pulling the ends apart to see who will get the longer piece, the securing of which is regarded as a lucky omen, signifying that the person holding it will obtain the gratification of some secret wish.

also wish-bone, 1860, from wish (n.) + bone (n.); so called from the custom of making a wish while pulling the bone in two with another person. The wishbone breaking custom dates to the early 17c., when the bone was a merrythought.

n. 1 A forked bone between the neck and breast of a bird consisting chiefly of the two clavicles fused at their median or lower end, regarded as a lucky charm in some countries. 2 (context nautical English) A spar in two parts, between which a sail is hoisted, the wishbone extending its clew. 3 (context nautical English) Any sailing vessel rigged with a wishbone.

n. the furcula of a domestic fowl [syn: wishing bone]

Wishbone commonly refers to the furcula, a y-shaped bone in birds and some other animals.

Wishbone may also refer to:

• Wishbone suspension, an automobile suspension design
• Wishbone (TV series), a children's educational television show about a Jack Russell Terrier
• Wishbone (computer bus), a non-proprietary (open) system bus/system-on-chip (SoC) interconnect architecture designed for reuse
• Wishbone formation, an offensive formation in American football
• Wishbone boom, commonly seen on sail boards
• Wish-Bone salad dressing
• Wish Bone (born 1975), American rapper
• Wish Bone (album), an album by Oh Land

Wishbone is a half-hour live-action children's television show that was produced from 1995 to 2001 and broadcast on PBS Kids. The show's title character is a Jack Russell Terrier. Wishbone lives with his owner Joe Talbot in the fictional town of Oakdale, Texas. He daydreams about being the lead character of stories from classic literature. He was known as "the little dog with a big imagination". Only the viewers and the characters in his daydreams can hear Wishbone speak. The characters from his daydreams see Wishbone as whichever famous character he is currently portraying and not as a dog. The show won four Daytime Emmies, a Peabody Award, and honors from the Television Critics Association. Wishbone's exterior shots were filmed on the backlot of Lyrick Studios's teen division Big Feats! Entertainment in Allen, Texas and its interior shots were filmed on a sound stage in a 50,000 square foot warehouse in Plano, Texas. Additional scenes were filmed in Grapevine, Texas.

This show garnered particular praise for refusing to bowdlerize many of the sadder or more unpleasant aspects of the source works, which usually enjoyed a fairly faithful retelling in the fantasy sequences.

The show also inspired several book series. Altogether, there are more than fifty books featuring Wishbone, which were published even after the TV series ended production. Reruns of the show continued to air on some PBS affiliates. In 2006 when a PBS Kids Go! digital channel was announced, PBS planned to air Wishbone on the channel. However, when the digital channel was canceled, Wishbone returned in reruns on the PBS national program service. Wishbone clips came to the PBS Kids Go! website. The return to PBS lasted a short time, though some PBS affiliates continued to air Wishbone until their license to do so ran out. The show continued to air in reruns until August 31, 2001.

The Wishbone Bus is an open source hardware computer bus intended to let the parts of an integrated circuit communicate with each other. The aim is to allow the connection of differing cores to each other inside of a chip. The Wishbone Bus is used by many designs in the OpenCores project.

A large number of open-source designs for CPUs and auxiliary computer peripherals have now been released with Wishbone interfaces. Many can be found at OpenCores, a foundation that attempts to make open-source hardware designs available.

Wishbone is intended as a "logic bus". It does not specify electrical information or the bus topology. Instead, the specification is written in terms of "signals", clock cycles, and high and low levels.

This ambiguity is intentional. Wishbone is made to let designers combine several designs written in Verilog, VHDL or some other logic-description language for electronic design automation. Wishbone provides a standard way for designers to combine these hardware logic designs (called "cores"). Wishbone is defined to have 8, 16, 32, and 64-bit buses. All signals are synchronous to a single clock but some slave responses must be generated combinatorially for maximum performance. Wishbone permits addition of a "tag bus" to describe the data. But reset, simple addressed reads and writes, movement of blocks of data, and indivisible bus cycles all work without tags.

Wishbone is open source, which makes it easy for engineers and hobbyists to share public domain designs for hardware logic on the Internet. To prevent preemption of its technologies by aggressive patenting, the Wishbone specification includes examples of prior art, to prove its concepts are in the public domain.

A device does not conform to the Wishbone specification unless it includes a data sheet that describes what it does, bus width, utilization, etc. Promoting reuse of a design requires the data sheet. Making a design reusable in turn makes it easier to share with others.