Contextualizebeta

cruft

noun
/kɹʌft/

Etymology

Circa 1959, MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. Unknown origin; possibly from Cruft Hall, built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft. Cruft Hall was the radar laboratory of Harvard's physics department during the Second World War, which contained much old and unused technical equipment. Possibly blend of crust + fluff, both of which may form on old abandoned things, or influenced by crud.

  1. derived from villūtus — “having shaggy hair”
  2. derived from velu — “hairy, furry”
  3. derived from vluwe
  4. compounded as cruft — “crust + fluff”

Definitions

  1. Anything that is old or of inferior quality.

  2. Redundant, old or improperly written code, especially that which accumulates over time.

    • Best developer practices run the gamut from keeping the cruft out of your code to ensuring your code is accessible to all your application or site’s users.
    • Sawyer cites responses to a message saying "there is cruft in [Perl]" as the excuse some Perl community members used to "push him into a corner" until he deactivated his Twitter account.

  3. Meaningless or gratuitous content displayed on computer consoles in visual entertainment…

    Meaningless or gratuitous content displayed on computer consoles in visual entertainment productions.

  4. ›+ 2 more definitions

    1. To generate cruft.

    2. A surname.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for cruft. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA