gadget – Wiktionary

English[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Unknown. First used in print by Robert Brown in 1886 (see quote in definition section). Might come from French gâchette or gagée. Compare Finnish koje (“instrument, device”).

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

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. (slang) Any consumer electronics product.
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.

Synonyms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Anagrams[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from English gadget.

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

gadget m (plural gadgets)

gadget m (invariable)

gadget m (plural gadgets)