> Meta (from the Greek preposition and prefix meta- (μετά-) meaning "after", or "beyond") is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.
Most usages of 'meta' that I encountered target the 'beyond' meaning, i.e. raising the abstraction level of something.
Clever, but not entirely accurate. May as well be pedantic: In some Lisps, you can set up the program so that it recompiles chunks of the program during execution. Which is either after the program runs or before the next evolution of the program, depending on how you look at it.