widget, 'People Widget'

Google Adds 'People Widget' to Gmail
PC Magazine
Over the next couple weeks, Google is rolling out the People Widget, which will make it easier than ever to see contextual information about your contacts. By William Fenton When Google isn't getting into your wallet, they're tinkering with your inbox. ...



A year ago at the same event, Kim put a lot of the emphasis on “widgets,” simple programs that appear on TV screens and exploit a format developed in an alliance with Yahoo. This year, he stressed that widgets are helpful but not sufficient; programmers need a more powerful development environment that they understand already.
The best candidate, Kim suggested, is Adobe Systems’ Flash format, which is already used to bring animations and video to Web sites. And not some stripped-down version of the technology, either, but technology that is capable of playing games and other sophisticated content. So Intel and Adobe announced plans to adapt its Flash Player 10 technology to consumer-electronics devices by the first half of 2010.




widget
n.

1. A small mechanical device or control; a gadget.
2. An unnamed or hypothetical manufactured article.

[Perhaps alteration of GADGET.]


以“widget”（小工具）這個詞為例﹐

如果你在谷歌上快速搜索這個詞﹐排在最前面的鏈接是蘋果(Apple)和雅虎(Yahoo)的工具指引﹐隨後則是維基百科(Wikipedia)。即便不打開這些鏈接﹐你也能輕鬆猜到﹐這個詞如今指的是網站上的某種附加功能。 用現在對這個詞的理解對比下2009版Merriam-Webster詞典（免費網絡版或印刷版）裡面的解釋：“為了假設例子所考慮的未標題文章“。什麼？這部字典也沒有提供例句來解釋一下。 2009 版American Heritage詞典（你可以通過Dictionary.com網站免費查閱）的解釋較為貼近當前。該字典對widget的解釋是“一個運行一些簡單功能 的程序﹐例如提供天氣預報或股票報價﹐可以通過電腦桌面、網頁、手機或訂閱電視服務使用”。不過﹐同樣沒有提供例句。 擁有295年曆史的 《牛津英語詞典》(Oxford English Dictionary)網絡版的情況更為糟糕。這個詞條的落款是“2003年11月添加的暫定解釋”﹐其解釋如下：“電腦屏幕上的一個視覺符號﹔圖形用戶 界面上的的一個圖形設備﹔啟動此類設備時相關操作涉及的軟件和數據﹐尤其是共同組成一個工具。” 共同組成一個工具？過去的6年時間﹐《牛津英語詞典》的編輯們難道都沒有機會更新一下這繞口的解釋？ 最後﹐我轉向一個新的網絡詞典Wordnik。關於“widget”一詞的解釋同樣也是過時的。不過﹐在相關解釋的下面是一串來自於Twitter和一些科技刊物的例句﹐非常好地詮釋了這個詞語的含義和當前用途。真是很棒！