gadget

noun gadgets · gadjet

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.
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.
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.
4. 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.
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.

Similar: contraption, contrivance, doohickey, gizmo, widget