Also * or Indirection. Access the value pointed to by a pointer.

A reference is a scalar that points to a value. The act of dereferencing means to follow the link to arrive at the value. For example, you can create a reference with the following $foo = \10;. This makes $foo a reference to an anonymous literal value of 10. Printing $foo prints the value of the reference. To get at the value, you need to dereference $foo like this ${$foo}. The symbol in front of the curly brace depends on the type of reference. Use $ for scalars, @ for arrays, and % for hashes. See also Reference.

vt. To look up a value referred to. Usually, the ``value referred to'' is the value pointed to by a pointer, so to ``dereference a pointer'' simply means to see what it points to (in C, either with the unary * operator or the ``array subscripting'' operator []). Occasionally, may refer to the fetching of the value of any variable. See also indirect.