gadget
English
Etymology
Unknown. First used in print by Robert Brown in 1886 (see quote in definition section). Might come from French gâchette or gagée, or from the French family name Gaget, an industrialist who produced promotional gadgets in collaboration with the project to build the statue of Liberty.
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ɡædʒɪt/
- (General American) IPA(key): /ɡæd͡ʒət/
Audio (GA) (file) - Rhymes: -ædʒɪt
- Hyphenation: gad‧get
Noun
gadget (plural gadgets)
- (obsolete) A thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey.
- 1886, Robert Brown, Spunyard and Spindrift, A Sailor Boy's Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-clipper:
- Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don't know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom—just pro tem., you know.
- 1886, Robert Brown, Spunyard and Spindrift, A Sailor Boy's Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-clipper:
- Any device or machine, especially one whose name cannot be recalled. Often either clever or complicated.
- He bought a neat new gadget for shredding potatoes.
- That's quite a lot of gadgets you have collected. Do you use any of them?
- (informal) Any consumer electronics product.
- 1987, Kerry Cue, Hang On To Your Horses Doovers, page 5:
- From the Marvel Mixmaster to the Miracle Microwave, every time a new-fangled gadget has lobbed into the Aussie kitchen, Aussie mums have changed their cooking styles accordingly.
-
- (computing) A sequence of machine code instructions crafted as part of an exploit that attempts to divert execution to a memory location chosen by the attacker.
- Security > Red Hat > CVE Database > CVE-2019-1125
- A Spectre gadget was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of system interrupts.
- Security > Red Hat > CVE Database > CVE-2019-1125
- (computer science) A technique for converting a part of one problem to an equivalent part of another problem. Used in constructing reductions.
- We reduce an instance of 3-SAT to an instance of bird-flock-optimization, using a gadget that converts each conjunctive Boolean clause to a group of birds.
Alternative forms
- gadjet
Synonyms
- contraption
- contrivance
- doohickey
- gizmo
- widget
Derived terms
- gadgetbahn
- gadgety
Translations
any device or machine
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Further reading
gadget on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
Anagrams
- dagget, tagged
French
Etymology
Borrowed from English gadget, itself of French origin.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ɡa.dʒɛt/
Audio (file)
Noun
gadget m (plural gadgets)
- gadget
Synonyms
- truc
- machin
Further reading
- “gadget”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
Italian
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from English gadget.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈɡad.d͡ʒet/[1]
- Rhymes: -addʒet
Noun
gadget m (invariable)
- gadget (small device)
References
- gadget in Luciano Canepari, Dizionario di Pronuncia Italiana (DiPI)
Romanian
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from English gadget.
Noun
gadget n (plural gadgeturi)
- gadget
Declension
Declension of gadget
singular | plural | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
indefinite articulation | definite articulation | indefinite articulation | definite articulation | |
nominative/accusative | (un) gadget | gadgetul | (niște) gadgeturi | gadgeturile |
genitive/dative | (unui) gadget | gadgetului | (unor) gadgeturi | gadgeturilor |
vocative | gadgetule | gadgeturilor |
Spanish
Etymology
Borrowed from English gadget.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): (everywhere but Argentina and Uruguay) /ˈɡaʝet/ [ˈɡa.ʝet̪]
- IPA(key): (Buenos Aires and environs) /ˈɡaʃet/ [ˈɡa.ʃet̪]
- IPA(key): (elsewhere in Argentina and Uruguay) /ˈɡaʒet/ [ˈɡa.ʒet̪]
- Rhymes: -aʝet
Noun
gadget m (plural gadgets)
- gadget