I remember Apache Groovy's use of the verb def to match the verbs and adverbs of the other statement-level keywords (e.g. switch, if, while, return) instead of a noun like any to match the type names it stands in for (e.g. int, bool, String, null) was, er, discussed at length on their mailing list back around 2005-06. The Nabble interface to those discussions has since been obfuscated by being redirected and embedded within a page from the groovy-lang.org website so I can't easily find a link to those discussions.

> In contrast, def doesn't explain what is defined. (See Groovy where it is a real problem or JavaScript where you can use var for everything.)

Does that matter? I'm used to Scala where `def x = 4` is just as good as `val x = 4` as far as a beginner's concerned.