The word k8s, meaning “k, followed by 8 letters, followed by s”, is a frequently used shortening of Kubernetes, because if there’s one thing techies hate it’s typing characters.
But what else could this shortening mean?
- kakidrosis - noun, secretion of sweat with noticeable odour
- kaligenous - adj, the quality of forming alkalis (for example, alkali metals)
- kanephoros - noun, a title given to unmarried young women in ancient Greece, who would lead festival processions
- karyolysis - noun, the dissolution of a cell nucleus, for example during mitosis
- keeperless - adj, being without a keeper
- keratinous - adj, containing or being made of keratin
- kernelless - adj, being without a kernel
- kindliness - noun, the quality of being kind
- kinematics - noun, a subfield of physics that describes the motion of “things” without considering the forces that cause them to move
- kingliness - noun, the demeanour of royal status
- kittenless - adj, being without a kitten :(
- kittlepins - noun, another word for skittles
- knightless - adj, being without a knight
- knobbiness - noun, the quality of being “knobby”
- knottiness - noun, the quality of being “knotty”
These are just words straight out of the dictionary. If you included punctuation or spaces, the possibilities are much bigger.
You could even make up your own words! Who’s going to stop you, the Kubernetes police?
The How
I pulled the words from my local dictionary using
grep -E "^k.{8}s$" /usr/share/dict/words
I pulled the meanings via Google from Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia, and other specialised sites.
I could not find definitions for kinofluous (which I have decided means “going to the cinema too often”) or keratoncus (which could be a misspelling of keratoconus, an eye condition).