Cruft

Around 1958, the term was used in the sense of "garbage" by students frequenting the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft,[4] it housed the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II.

The FreeBSD handbook uses the term to refer to leftover or superseded object code that accumulates in a folder or directory when software is recompiled and new executables and data files are produced.

[7] Cruft accumulation may result in technical debt, which can subsequently make adding new features or modifying existing features—even to improve performance—more difficult and time-consuming.

In the context of Internet or Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators or "URLs"), cruft refers to the characters that are relevant or meaningful only to the people who created the site, such as implementation details of the computer system which serves the page.