breadcrumb
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: compound
Topics: computing
cooking
engineering
food
graphical-user-interface
lifestyle
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
programming
sciences
Etymology: From bread + crumb. The computing and figurative senses allude to the German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, where Hansel leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to find the way back home when venturing into the woods.
Compound parts: bread
crumb
Inflected forms:
form: breadcrumbs
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: bread crumb
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: breadcrumbs
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: breadcrumbing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: breadcrumbed
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: breadcrumbed
pos: verb
tags: past
form: bread crumb
pos: verb
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: A tiny piece of bread, either one that falls from bread as it is cut or eaten, or one made deliberately by crumbling bread.
pos: noun
tags: in-plural
gloss: A single link in a chain indicating the hierarchical location of a directory, web page or similar, used as a navigation aid.
pos: noun
tags: in-plural
examples: Breadcrumbs usually look something like this: "Home > About Us > Staff" and are positioned near the top navigation. […] The words in the breadcrumbs are links to pages at higher levels of the website.
gloss: A fragment of data that serves to log the actions taken by a program, used in debugging.
pos: noun
tags: in-plural
examples: If you believe the system can merrily proceed despite an assertion failure, code the exception handler to log the error, leaving debugging breadcrumbs behind, and return.
[…] track metrics used to improve performance, or log a series of breadcrumbs to track an application's progress, […]
gloss: One in a series of clues leading to a person or place.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
in-plural
examples: Before he died, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the hermit-like, socially maladjusted tech genius who created The Oasis, hid an Easter egg somewhere in the circuitry, scattering bread crumbs that lead to its location. Find the egg, and the mogul’s fortune—along with total control of his digital fiefdom—is yours. It’s the ultimate capitalist scavenger hunt!
gloss: To sprinkle breadcrumbs on to food, normally before cooking.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: All this breadcrumbing finished, you can put the meat on a grid over a baking dish and leave it until you are ready to cook it.
Said chef then proceeds to cough slimy phlegm all over the veal before it is breadcrumbed.
A Swede can't imagine a more summery food than breadcrumbed Baltic herring fillets stuffed with dill or parsley and soused in an oldfashioned vinegar
gloss: To add navigational breadcrumbs to (a web page or user interface).
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: Along those same lines, creating separate folders can enable you to use "breadcrumbing," which is another navigation aid (discussed in the section "Determining How to Organize the Information," later in this chapter).
One navigational technique—breadcrumbing—is like having a “You Are Here” store directory in each aisle.
The most striking change from previous versions of Windows is that Vista displays the path using a method called breadcrumbing.
gloss: To use clues or enticements to lead someone in the desired direction.
pos: verb
examples: The process of breadcrumbing is the means by which a game writer can lead the player forward with a trail of clues, or the level designers can lead the player via more physical symbols.
I consider where more landmarks are needed and other changes for better flow and breadcrumbing.
An alternate reality game—ARG—is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as its media platform and uses storytelling “bread-crumbed” across several media to deliver a story that is altered and impacted in real time by the participants' ideas and actions (Dena, 2008; Denward & Waern, 2008; Werner, 2008).
It was what had attracted me to her in the first place. "You can say something," I said. "I'm easy to talk to." She frowned. The last time we had a private talk, in her kitchen, she admitted to playing me for a fool, making me fall in love with her, and breadcrumbing my way to discovering a deadly necromantic artifact.
Related words: cookie
Derived words: breadcrumb sponge
breadcrumby
breadcrumb up
Translations:
lang: Chinese Mandarin
word: 麵包屑導航 /面包屑导航
lang: Czech
word: drobečková navigace
lang: Finnish
word: leivänmurut
lang: French
word: fil d'Ariane
lang: Marathi
word: ब्रेडक्रंब
roman: breḍakramba
lang: Polish
word: okruszek chleba