gadget

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.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɡædʒɪt/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ɡæd͡ʒət/

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: gad‧get
• Rhymes: -ædʒɪt

gadget (plural gadgets)

1. (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.

2. 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?

3. (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.

4. (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.

5. (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.

6. (glassblowing) A spring clip attached to the end of a punty in order to grasp the foot of a glass without leaving a bullion while finishing the bowl.

• gadjet

• contraption
• contrivance
• doohickey
• gizmo
• widget

• gadget on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• dagget, tagged

Borrowed from English gadget.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡɛd.ʒət/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Hyphenation: gad‧get

gadget m or n (plural gadgets, diminutive gadgetje n)

1. gadget

Borrowed from English gadget, itself of French origin.

• IPA^(key): /ɡa.dʒɛt/

• Audio:

  (file)

gadget m (plural gadgets)

1. gadget

• truc
• machin

• “gadget”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé , 2012.

Unadapted borrowing from English gadget.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡad.d͡ʒet/^[1]
• Rhymes: -addʒet

gadget m (invariable)

1. gadget (small device)

Unadapted borrowing from English gadget.

gadget n (plural gadgeturi)

1. gadget

Borrowed from English gadget.

• Rhymes: -aʝet

• Rhymes: -adʝet

gadget m (plural gadgets)

1. gadget