- 1
A thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey.obsolete
- 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 gadj
- 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
Any consumer electronics product.informal
- 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
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.
- A Spectre gadget was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of system interrupts.
- 5
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
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.
syn. contraption · contrivance · doohickey · gizmo · widget