Another WOTY candidate: hanging chads

[Mark Odegard]

>fascinating.  here in california i've seen "chad" used only as a mass noun.
>  so it would have to be "hanging bits/pieces of chad".
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

The word is new to me, but I see the online AH and MW both treat it as
countable.

I wonder if the etymology is an alteration of 'chaff', the stuff that
falls/blows away when threshing wheat (AHD4's sense 1). The semantic space
is right. Curiously, MW does not have this sense; the sense it does have is
unfamiliar to me.

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