bare metal
n.— «Other products, such as Xen and VMware’s ESX Server, run in a hypervisor that sits beneath the guest operating systems and the hardware. Because the software layer sits on the “bare metal,” these are sometimes referred to as hardware VMs. Direct contact with the system hardware allows the VMs to work more efficiently.» —“Under the Hood: The Soul of a Virtual Machine” by Robert L. Mitchell Computerworld Apr. 25, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...