[rare; sometimes ‘POD’ without the periods] Acronym for ‘Piece Of Data’ or ‘Plain Old Data’ (as opposed to a code section, or a section containing mixed code and data). The latter expansion was in use by the C++ standards committee, for which it indicated a struct or class which only contains data (as in C), distinguished from one which has a constructor and member functions. There are things which you can do with a P.O.D. which you can't with a more general class.