cruft
/kɹʌft/
cruft noun: anything that is old or of inferior quality.
Noun
cruft (uncountable)
- Anything that is old or of inferior quality.
- Students “still think of privacy as ‘the one secret I don’t want revealed,’ and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff, of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want anybody to know,”...2014, Jim Dwyer, quoting Eben Moglen, More Awesome Than Money, Viking, →ISBN, pages 26–27
- The document just goes on at length in the same way, picking out the sort of cruft that’s been littering Trump’s Twitter feed since Nov. 3 and tying it all into one stinky package. It’s sincerely not worth running through the entire litany again; simply consider The Post’s Fact Checker articles as...2020, The Washington Post
- Redundant, old or improperly written code, especially that which accumulates over time.
- The PEB includes the list of loaded modules (i.e., the EXE and DLLs), the memory containing environment strings, the current working directory, and data for managing the process’ heaps—as well as lots of special-case Win32 cruft that has been added over time.2015 [1992], Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, 4th edition, →ISBN, page 908
- 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.2015, Shelley Powers, JavaScript Cookbook, Sebastopol: O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 143
- Synonyms:
- clutter
- Meaningless or gratuitous content displayed on computer consoles in visual entertainment productions.
Verb
cruft (third-person singular simple present crufts, present participle crufting, simple past and past participle crufted)
- To generate cruft.
Proper noun capitalized: Cruft
Cruft
- A surname.
Examples of cruft in a sentence
- The document just goes on at length in the same way, picking out the sort of cruft that’s been littering Trump’s Twitter feed since Nov. 3 and tying it all into one stinky package.2020, The Washington Post:
- 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.2021 August 14, Jim Salter, quoting Sawyer X, “The Perl Foundation is fragmenting over Code of Conduct enforcement”, in Ars Technica:
Synonyms of cruft
Forms of cruft
| third-person singular present | crufts |
|---|---|
| present participle | crufting |
| past participle | crufted |
| past | crufted |
Origin of cruft
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.
Words formed from cruft
Words that rhyme with cruft
Questions about cruft
- What does cruft mean?
- Cruft means anything that is old or of inferior quality.
- How do you use cruft in a sentence?
- The document just goes on at length in the same way, picking out the sort of cruft that’s been littering Trump’s Twitter feed since Nov. 3 and tying it all into one stinky package.
- What part of speech is cruft?
- Cruft can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce cruft?
- Cruft is pronounced /kɹʌft/.
Words near cruft in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cruft (page history and authors); Cruft (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-cruft.wav.
Cite this entry: “cruft.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cruft. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.