Other forms: widgets
A widget is a small self-contained piece of an interface. A weather widget, add a widget, widget library.
Buttons, sliders and menus are all widgets, and a toolkit is a library of them — the word gives programmers one term for anything a user can point at. In economics, widget is the standard placeholder for an unspecified manufactured product. It was coined in a 1924 play as a nonsense word for exactly that.
1nounwidgetA small self-contained piece of an interface.
“You can add a weather widget to your phone's home screen.”
2nounplaceholderA placeholder for an unspecified product.
“Imagine a company that makes widgets and must decide how many to produce each month.”
widget is a component.
Coined in a 1924 play as a nonsense word for an unspecified manufactured item, perhaps suggested by gadget.
coined by George S. Kaufman in 1924 in his play Beggar on Horseback (1924). The preface to the 1924 play credits [https://digital.ulb.hhu.de/download/pdf/5670231.pdf an earlier German work from 1911] where there is an actor Elisabeth Wigge.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Computing & Code