What does DIM stand for in Visual Basic and BASIC?

Question

What does DIM stand for in Visual Basic?

Answer 1

It's short for Dimension, as it was originally used in BASIC to specify the size of arrays.

DIM — (short for dimension) define the size of arrays

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC

A part of the original BASIC compiler source code, where it would jump when finding a DIM command, in which you can clearly see the original intention for the keyword:

DIM    LDA XR01             BACK OFF OBJECT POINTER
       SUB N3
       STA RX01
       LDA L        2       GET VARIABLE TO BE DIMENSIONED
       STA 3
       LDA S        3
       CAB N36              CHECK FOR $ ARRAY
       BRU *+7              NOT $
       ...

Ref: http://dtss.dartmouth.edu/scans/BASIC/BASIC%20Compiler.pdf

Later on it came to be used to declare all kinds of variables, when the possibility to specify the type for variables was added in more recent implementations.