Cruft
name, noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Anything that is old or of inferior quality. slang, uncountable
"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."
- 2 Redundant, old or improperly written code, especially that which accumulates over time. slang, uncountable
"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."
- 3 Meaningless or gratuitous content displayed on computer consoles in visual entertainment productions. slang, uncountable
- 1 To generate cruft. slang
- 1 A surname.
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"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."
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.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.