Macro

Big.

This one has con­fused me for a long time. I’m famil­iar with a lot of dif­fer­ent uses of this by itself and as a mod­i­fi­er, and have been curi­ous how those uses came from the same source, what’s com­mon between, say, a *mac­ro­bi­ot­ic diet* and a *key­board macro*. It’s still vex­ing that we use a *micro­scope* to look at small things, and a *macro lens* to take pic­tures of small things (to be fair, Nikkor does mark their close-focus­ing lens­es «micro»). So any­how, a *com­put­er macro* is a macroin­struc­tion, or super-high-lev­el instruc­tion, made up of many oth­er con­cep­tu­al­ly small­er instruc­tions. *Mac­ro­bi­ot­ic* refers to food choic­es designed to give us longer lives.