gadget

Noun

gadget (plural gadgets)

1. (obsolete) A thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey.
   • 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.1886, Robert Brown, Spunyard and Spindrift, A Sailor Boy's Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-clipper
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. (informal) Any consumer electronics product.
   • From the Marvel Mixmaster to the Miracle Microwave, every time a new-fangled gadget has lobbed into the Aussie kitchen, Aussie mums have changed their cooking styles accordingly.1987, Kerry Cue, Hang On To Your Horses Doovers, page 5
4. (computer security) 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.
   • A Spectre gadget was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of system interrupts.Security > Red Hat > CVE Database > CVE-2019-1125
5. A technique for converting a part of one problem to an equivalent part of another problem, used in constructing reductions.
   • We reduce an instance of 3-SAT to an instance of bird-flock-optimization, using a gadget that converts each conjunctive Boolean clause to a group of birds.
6. A spring clip attached to the end of a punty in order to grasp the foot of a glass without leaving a bullion while finishing the bowl.