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Gadget vs Artifact - What's the difference?

gadget | artifact |

As nouns the difference between gadget and artifact

is that gadget is (obsolete) a thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey while artifact is an object made or shaped by human hand.

gadget

English

(wikipedia gadget)

Alternative forms

* gadjet

Noun

(en noun)
  • (obsolete) a thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey
  • * 1886 , Robert Brown, Spunyard and Spindrift, A Sailor Boy's Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-clipper :
    • Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don't know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet , or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom—just pro tem. , you know.
  • any device or machine, especially one whose name cannot be recalled. Often either clever or complicated.
    • He bought a neat new gadget for shredding potatoes.
    That's quite a lot of gadgets you have collected. Do you use any of them?

    Synonyms

    * contraption * contrivance * doohickey * gizmo * widget

    Derived terms

    * gadgety

    Anagrams

    * English placeholder terms ----

    artifact

    English

    Alternative forms

    * artefact

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • An object made or shaped by human hand.
  • (archaeology) An object, such as a tool, weapon or ornament, of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.
    • The dig produced many Roman artifacts .
  • Something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element.
  • * "The very act of looking at a naked model was an artifact of male supremacy" (Philip Weiss).
  • A structure or finding in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.
    • The spot on his lung turned out to be an artifact of the X-ray process.
  • An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
  • (computing) A perceptible distortion that appears in a digital image, audio or video file as a result of applying a lossy compression algorithm.
    • This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has too many unsightly compression artifacts , making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.

    References

    * * "artefact" is the preferred spelling in Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary'', with ''artifact listed as a variant. * "artifact" is preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary and most American dictionaries.