breadcrumb
/ˈbɹɛdˌkɹʌm/
breadcrumb noun: a tiny piece of bread, either one that falls from bread as it is cut or eaten, or one made deliberately by crumbling bread.
Noun
breadcrumb (plural breadcrumbs)
- A tiny piece of bread, either one that falls from bread as it is cut or eaten, or one made deliberately by crumbling bread.
- Synonyms:
- crumb
- A single link in a chain indicating the hierarchical location of a directory, web page or similar, used as a navigation aid.
- Breadcrumbs usually look something like this: "Home > About Us > Staff" and are positioned near the top navigation. […] The words in the breadcrumbs are links to pages at higher levels of the website.2010, Mark Stephenson, Web-Empower Your Church
- A fragment of data that serves to log the actions taken by a program, used in debugging.
- If you believe the system can merrily proceed despite an assertion failure, code the exception handler to log the error, leaving debugging breadcrumbs behind, and return.2004, Jack Ganssle, The Firmware Handbook, page 276
- […] track metrics used to improve performance, or log a series of breadcrumbs to track an application's progress, […]2012, Wallace B. McClure, Nathan Blevins, John J. Croft IV, Wrox Cross Platform Android and iOS Mobile Development Three-Pack
- One in a series of clues leading to a person or place.
- Before he died, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the hermit-like, socially maladjusted tech genius who created The Oasis, hid an Easter egg somewhere in the circuitry, scattering bread crumbs that lead to its location. Find the egg, and the mogul’s fortune—along with total control of his digital...2018 March 26, A. A. Dowd, “Steven Spielberg Finds Fun, and maybe even a Soul, in the Pandering Pastiche of Ready Player One”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 31 May 2018
Verb
breadcrumb (third-person singular simple present breadcrumbs, present participle breadcrumbing, simple past and past participle breadcrumbed)
- To sprinkle breadcrumbs on to food, normally before cooking.
- All this breadcrumbing finished, you can put the meat on a grid over a baking dish and leave it until you are ready to cook it.2009, Elizabeth David, Omelette and a Glass Of Wine, →ISBN
- Said chef then proceeds to cough slimy phlegm all over the veal before it is breadcrumbed.2010, Teri Louise Kelly, Sex, Knives and Bouillabaisse, →ISBN
- To add navigational breadcrumbs to (a web page or user interface).
- Along those same lines, creating separate folders can enable you to use "breadcrumbing," which is another navigation aid (discussed in the section "Determining How to Organize the Information," later in this chapter).2003, Sybex Inc., HTML complete, page 155
- One navigational technique—breadcrumbing—is like having a “You Are Here” store directory in each aisle.2003, Kreta Chandler, Karen Hyatt, Customer-centered Design: A New Approach to Web Usability, →ISBN
- To use clues or enticements to lead someone in the desired direction.
- The process of breadcrumbing is the means by which a game writer can lead the player forward with a trail of clues, or the level designers can lead the player via more physical symbols.2007, Chris Mark Bateman, Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, page 89
- I consider where more landmarks are needed and other changes for better flow and breadcrumbing.2016, Christopher W. Totten, An Architectural Approach to Level Design, →ISBN, pages 198–199
breadcrumb meaning in Marathi, Arabic, Malay and Indonesian
breadcrumb in Marathi
- trail of hyperlinks
- ब्रेडक्रंब breḍakramba
breadcrumb in Arabic
- tiny piece of bread
- بُقْسُمَاطْ buqsumāṭ
breadcrumb in Malay
- tiny piece of bread
- serdak roti, serbuk roti
breadcrumb in Indonesian
- tiny piece of bread
- panir
More languagesFewer languages
- breadcrumb in Persian
- مغز نان maġz-e nân
- breadcrumb in Vietnamese
- bột chiên xù, vụn bánh mì
Examples of breadcrumb in a sentence
- A Swede can't imagine a more summery food than breadcrumbed Baltic herring fillets stuffed with dill or parsley and soused in an oldfashioned vinegar2011, Sten Sture Skaldeman, Lose Weight by Eating, →ISBN:
- The most striking change from previous versions of Windows is that Vista displays the path using a method called breadcrumbing.2007, John Rizzo, Moving to Microsoft Windows Vista: Visual Quickproject Guide, →ISBN, page 93:
- The last time we had a private talk, in her kitchen, she admitted to playing me for a fool, making me fall in love with her, and breadcrumbing my way to discovering a deadly necromantic artifact.2016, Domino Finn, Heart Strings:
Synonyms of breadcrumb
Forms of breadcrumb
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | breadcrumbs |
| alternative form | bread crumb |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | breadcrumbs |
| present participle | breadcrumbing |
| past participle | breadcrumbed |
| past | breadcrumbed |
Origin of breadcrumb
From bread + crumb. The computing and figurative senses allude to the German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, where Hansel leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to find the way back home when venturing into the woods.
Words formed from breadcrumb
Phrases with breadcrumb
Questions about breadcrumb
- What does breadcrumb mean?
- Breadcrumb means a tiny piece of bread, either one that falls from bread as it is cut or eaten, or one made deliberately by crumbling bread.
- What is breadcrumb in Marathi?
- Breadcrumb in Marathi is ब्रेडक्रंब (breḍakramba). See Breadcrumb meaning in Marathi.
- How do you use breadcrumb in a sentence?
- A Swede can't imagine a more summery food than breadcrumbed Baltic herring fillets stuffed with dill or parsley and soused in an oldfashioned vinegar
- What part of speech is breadcrumb?
- Breadcrumb can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce breadcrumb?
- Breadcrumb is pronounced /ˈbɹɛdˌkɹʌm/ (US).
- What is the plural of breadcrumb?
- The plural of breadcrumb is breadcrumbs.
Words near breadcrumb in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: breadcrumb (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-breadcrumb.ogg.
Cite this entry: “breadcrumb.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/breadcrumb. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.