to quickly check the status of a particular activity, often to ensure that appropriate progress has been made, as in “Let’s do a dipstick on the report this evening and see how far we’ve come”; derives from the process used to check an automobile’s oil reserve in which a flexible metal stick is snaked into the reservoir and marked at the fluid level; in the real world such monitoring is critical, as insufficient oil can lead to catastrophic engine failure; in the business context, by contrast, this term is used in an offhand fashion for issues with low stakes, as is often the case with jargon repurposed from other contexts