1. 1  any of several threadlike bodies, consisting of chromatin, that carry the genes in a linear order: the human species has 23 pairs, designated 1 to 22 in order of decreasing size and X and Y for the female and male sex chromosomes respectively.
data source name (DSN) A data source name (DSN) is a data structure that contains the information about a specific database that an Open Database Connectivity ( ODBC ) driver needs in order to connect to it.
Related Terms. Data Source Name (DSN) provides connectivity to a database through an ODBC driver. The DSN contains database name, directory, database driver, UserID, password, and other information. Once you create a DSN for a particular database, you can use the DSN in an application to call information from the database.