gadget

Plural: gadgets

Noun

• A small, novel, and often ingenious mechanical device.
• a device or control that is very useful for a particular job
• A thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey.
• Any device or machine, especially one whose name cannot be recalled, often either clever or complicated.
• Any consumer electronics product.
• 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 technique for converting a part of one problem to an equivalent part of another problem, used in constructing reductions.
• 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.

Examples

• He bought a neat new gadget for shredding potatoes.
• Some players use various apps as a Scrabble gadget to analyze past game data.
• That's quite a lot of gadgets you have collected. Do you use any of them?
• 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.

Synonyms

appliance, contraption, contrivance, convenience, gismo, gizmo, widget, doohickey

Related Words

GADGETY