breadcrumb

Definition

A tiny piece of bread, either one that falls from bread as it is cut or eaten, or one made deliberately by crumbling bread.

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.

Example Sentences

• "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."
• "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, […]"

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