English

Alternative forms

• gadjet

Noun

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

• contraption
• contrivance
• doohickey
• gizmo
• widget

Derived terms

• gadgety

Translations

Anagrams

• tagged

French

Etymology

Borrowing from English gadget.

Noun

gadget m ‎(plural gadgets)

1. gadget

Italian

Etymology

Borrowing from English gadget.

Noun

gadget m ‎(invariable)

1. gadget (small device)

Spanish

Etymology

Borrowing from English gadget.

Noun

gadget m ‎(plural gadgets)

1. gadget