cruft en · NOUN
Pronunciation
- /kɹʌft/
- (Southern-England) audio
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.
Meanings
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(slang, 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,” Moglen said.
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 an effective rejoinder.
2020, The Washington Post:
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(slang, uncountable) Redundant, old or improperly written code, especially that which accumulates over time.
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: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: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:
- (slang, uncountable) Meaningless or gratuitous content displayed on computer consoles in visual entertainment productions.
Deriveds
fancruft · crufting · cruftware · crufty
Synonyms
Translations (21)
de Schrott (anything old or of inferior quality) · fi roska (anything old or of inferior quality) · pl chłam (anything old or of inferior quality) · de Überflüssiges (anything old or of inferior quality) · ru барахло́ (anything old or of inferior quality) · gl quincalla (anything old or of inferior quality) · tr fuzuli (anything old or of inferior quality) · ru старьё (anything old or of inferior quality) · da skrammel (anything old or of inferior quality) · pl rupieć (anything old or of inferior quality) · de Ramsch (anything old or of inferior quality) · pl barachło (anything old or of inferior quality) · nn skrammel (anything old or of inferior quality) · pl szajs (anything old or of inferior quality) · nn skrap (anything old or of inferior quality) · pt tranqueira (anything old or of inferior quality) · de Krempel (anything old or of inferior quality) · ru хлам (anything old or of inferior quality) · ru ру́хлядь (anything old or of inferior quality) · nn skrot (anything old or of inferior quality) · de Müll (anything old or of inferior quality)