baz
loreprogramming
The third metasyntactic placeholder, following foo and bar.
When an example needs more than two placeholder names, "baz" comes next, then "qux". Like foo and bar, its lineage is recorded in RFC 3092.
Baz is the third placeholder, arriving after foo and bar when an example needs another arbitrary name, and it is followed by qux and then by increasingly disputed conventions that no one agrees on.
Its etymology is the most contested of the set and probably reflects a truth about all of them: baz most likely emerged simply because two placeholders were not always enough and the sequence needed continuation. The Jargon File records the usage without settling the origin, and RFC 3092 documents the family while treating the derivations as folklore rather than fact.
Where it earns a mention of its own is in what happens past qux. There is no agreed fifth, and examples that need one reveal the author's background: quux marks a Lisp lineage, corge and grault come from a different tradition, and many people simply switch to numbered names. That is a small ethnographic signal in otherwise anonymous documentation, and it is the sort of thing that makes placeholder names worth a glossary entry rather than a footnote.
Also known as: metasyntactic variable, qux