autovivification

A Greco-Roman word meaning "to bring oneself to life". In Perl, storage locations (lvalues) spontaneously generate themselves as needed, including the creation of any "hard reference" values to point to the next level of storage. The assignment $a[5][5][5][5][5] = "quintet" potentially creates five scalar storage locations, plus four references (in the first four scalar locations) pointing to four new anonymous arrays (to hold the last four scalar locations). But the point of autovivification is that you don't have to worry about it.