Source : Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Advent \Ad`vent\, n. [L. adventus, fr. advenire, adventum: cf.
   F. avent. See {Advene}.]
   1. (Eccl.) The period including the four Sundays before
      Christmas.

   {Advent Sunday} (Eccl.), the first Sunday in the season of
      Advent, being always the nearest Sunday to the feast of
      St. Andrew (Now. 30). --Shipley.

   2. The first or the expected second coming of Christ.

   3. Coming; any important arrival; approach.

            Death's dreadful advent.              --Young.

            Expecting still his advent home.      --Tennyson.

Source : WordNet®

advent
     n 1: arrival that has been awaited (especially of something
          momentous); "the advent of the computer" [syn: {coming}]
     2: the season including the four Sundays preceding Christmas
     3: (Christian theology) the reappearance of Jesus as judge for
        the Last Judgment [syn: {Second Coming}, {Second Coming of
        Christ}, {Second Advent}, {Parousia}]

Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

ADVENT
     
         /ad'vent/ The prototypical computer {Adventure} game,
        first implemented by Will Crowther for a {CDC} computer
        (probably the 6600?) as an attempt at computer-refereed
        fantasy gaming.
     
        ADVENT was ported to the {PDP-10}, and expanded to the
        350-point {Classic} puzzle-oriented version, by Don Woods of
        the {Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory} (SAIL).  The
        game is now better known as Adventure, but the {TOPS-10}
        {operating system} permitted only six-letter filenames.  All
        the versions since are based on the SAIL port.
     
        David Long of the {University of Chicago} Graduate School of
        Business Computing Facility (which had two of the four
        {DEC20}s on campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s) was
        responsible for expanding the cave in a number of ways, and
        pushing the point count up to 500, then 501 points.  Most of
        his work was in the data files, but he made some changes to
        the {parser} as well.
     
        This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style now expected
        in text adventure games, and popularised several tag lines
        that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green
        fierce snake bars the way!"  "I see no X here" (for some noun
        X).  "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
        "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different."
        The "magic words" {xyzzy} and {plugh} also derive from this
        game.
     
        Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the
        Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a
        "Colossal Cave" and a "Bedquilt" as in the game, and the "Y2"
        that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a
        secondary entrance.
     
        See also {vadding}.
     
        [Was the original written in Fortran?]
     
        [{Jargon File}]
     
        (1996-04-01)