(loneliness, poverty) Beauty with a sense of asceticism; austere beauty.

An aesthetic term - 'Solitary taste'.

(Pronunciation: "WAH-bee") A Japanese term, adopted from poetry, that suggested poverty or wretchedness. For Japanese tea masters, the wabi aesthetic meant that even simple ceramics and other locally made tea utensils could have their own humble beauty.

An attempt by Sun Microsystems to create a Windows clone under Unix. WABI works by intercepting calls from applications to the Windows API and converting them to X-Windows calls. IBM did take out a license for WABI, and announced it for AIX 1 in April 1994, but withdrew it in September 1996. When WABI was announced, everyone thought that it stood for Windows application binary interface, but Sun now vigorously denies this (without saying what it does stand for – what a brilliant idea, perhaps?). However, Windows application binary interface ( ABI) describes exactly what WABI does; one can only conjecture that Microsoft has got picky about this terminology. Sun finally laid WABI to rest when it announced a July 15, 1997, end of life date.