widget
/ˈwɪdʒɪt
/noun informal
1A small gadget or mechanical device.Gadgets and widgets and all that cool stuff that make life easier, or at least more fun, that's what I want to write about....
- As you get deeper into turkeys, you'll find an almost infinite number of widgets, gadgets and gimmicks for turkey hunters.
- Prior to stamping and polymer clay and all the other gadgets and widgets we have today, we had paints and canvas.
1.1(In some beer cans) a plastic device which introduces nitrogen into the beer, giving it a creamy head.Pop and outdoor ads sporting a rocket widget and a Guinness Draught bottle are aimed at building awareness for nitrogenated Guinness Draught and Stout in cans and bottles....
- A can of beer is pressurised by adding liquid nitrogen, which vaporises and expands in volume after the can is sealed, forcing gas and beer into the widget's hollow interior through a tiny hole - the less beer the better for subsequent head quality.
- The vast majority of canned beers in the U.S. are of the American Light Lager variety, for which a beer widget would be counterproductive.
1.2 Computing An application, or a component of an interface, that enables a user to perform a function or access a service.The days when developers would sit at a text editor manually arranging buttons, listboxes and other widgets by brain power alone are pretty much gone....
- For example, if the feature could be turned on an off via a checkbox widget, that information was included in the description along with whether the checkbox was selected or not selected by default.
- Behind your widget website there is a large database of widgets.
Origin
1930s: perhaps an alteration of gadget.
The widget is first recorded in the 1920s in the USA, in the general sense ‘a small gadget’, and is probably an alteration of gadget. In the early 1990s a widget became a specific sort of device used in some beer cans to introduce nitrogen into the beer, giving it a creamy head.