Word.ws English Dictionary

footgun

footgun noun: any feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.

Noun

footgun (plural footguns)

  1. (derogatory, humorous, slang) Any feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.
    • This is a footgun! ES6 should have specified that it either fulfills, rejects, or just throws some sort of synchronous error. Unfortunately, because of precedence in Promise libraries predating ES6 Promise, they had to leave this gotcha in there, […]2015, Kyle Simpson, You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN
    • If it is what Douglas Crockford might call a “footgun,” then at the very least, condoning and standardizing the “footwounds” will make problems easier to search for and fix.2017, Evan Burchard, Refactoring JavaScript: Turning Bad Code Into Good Code, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 262
  2. by extension, generalised from (1.): An opportunity or object that allows the unfortunate to mostly figuratively but sometimes literally shoot themselves in the foot. A less obvious footgun may be a pitfall (1.).

Verb

footgun (third-person singular simple present footguns, present participle footgunning, simple past and past participle footgunned)

  1. (idiomatic) To shoot oneself in the foot.

footgun meaning in Bengali

footgun in Bengali

নিজের ক্ষতি করা

Forms of footgun

Noun
pluralfootguns
Verb
third-person singular presentfootguns
present participlefootgunning
past participlefootgunned
pastfootgunned

Origin of footgun

From foot + gun.

Questions about footgun

What does footgun mean?
Footgun means any feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.
What is footgun in Bengali?
Footgun in Bengali is নিজের ক্ষতি করা. See Footgun meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is footgun?
Footgun can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of footgun?
The plural of footgun is footguns.

Words near footgun in the dictionary

  1. footgoer
  2. footgoers
  3. footgolf
  4. footguard
  5. footguards
  6. footgun
  7. footgunned
  8. footgunning
  9. footguns
  10. foothalt
  11. foothill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: footgun (page history and authors); footgun (Bengali Wiktionary) (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-au-footgun.ogg.

Cite this entry: “footgun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/footgun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.