Dictionary.net

/el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely calledEl Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsulathat originally extended all the way down to Mexico City andmany portions of which are still intact. Navigation on theSan Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El CaminoReal, which defines logical north and south even though itisn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runsright past Stanford University.The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/)means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In theFortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typicallyprecise to seven significant digits, and a "doubleprecision" quantity is a larger floating-point number,precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (otherlanguages have similar "real" types).When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, heremarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on"real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" -but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds ofmiles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that namehas stuck. (See bignum).