Source : Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Black hole \Black" hole`\
   A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a military lock-up or
   guardroom; -- now commonly with allusion to the cell (the
   Black Hole) in a fort at Calcutta, into which 146 English
   prisoners were thrust by the nabob Suraja Dowla on the night
   of June 20, 17656, and in which 123 of the prisoners died
   before morning from lack of air.

         A discipline of unlimited autocracy, upheld by rods,
         and ferules, and the black hole.         --H. Spencer.

Source : WordNet®

black hole
     n : a region of space resulting from the collapse of a star;
         extremely high gravitational field

Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

black hole
     
        1. An expression which depends on its own value or a technique
        to detect such expressions.  In graph reduction, when the
        reduction of an expression is begun, the root of the
        expression can be overwritten with a black hole.  If the
        expression depends on its own value, e.g.
     
        	x = x + 1
     
        then it will try to evaluate the black hole which will usually
        print an error message and abort the program.  A secondary
        effect is that, once the root of the expression has been
        black-holed, parts of the expression which are no longer
        required may be freed for garbage collection.
     
        Without black holes the usual result of attempting to evaluate
        an expression which depends on itself would be a stack
        overflow.  If the expression is evaluated successfully then
        the black hole will be updated with the value.
     
        Expressions such as
     
        	ones = 1 : ones
     
        are not black holes because the list constructor, : is lazy so
        the reference to ones is not evaluated when evaluating ones to
        WHNF.
     
        2. Where an {electronic mail} message or {news} aritcle has
        gone if it disappears mysteriously between its origin and
        destination sites without returning a {bounce message}.
        Compare {bit bucket}.
     
        [{Jargon File}]