Garbage In, Garbage Out
Garbage is household waste, chiefly in American English. Computing borrowed the word for a rule about bad data that has outlived its era.
Garbage is rubbish, especially food waste and household throwaways. Early programmers coined a phrase with it that still holds: *garbage in, garbage out* — a program handed bad data will produce bad results however good the code is. The phrase is now the standard warning about statistics and artificial intelligence alike.
- Household waste (American). *Take out the garbage.*
- Nonsense. *That report is garbage.*
- Garbage collection — automatic memory clean-up in software. *The language handles garbage collection.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | garbage | Bags of garbage. |
| Compound | garbage can | A metal garbage can. |
| Person | garbage collector | The garbage collector comes Tuesdays. |
| British | rubbish | Put the rubbish out. |
| Related | trash | Take out the trash. |
How it is used in a sentence
- Garbage is collected on Wednesdays.Uncountable.
- Garbage in, garbage out.The computing proverb, from the 1950s.
- He talked complete garbage for ten minutes.Meaning nonsense.
Rubbish by region
- Garbage — American, originally food waste
- Trash — American, originally dry waste
- Rubbish — British, and also means nonsense
- Refuse — the formal municipal word
- Litter — waste dropped in public
From Anglo-French *garbage*, the offal of a bird prepared for cooking. The meaning widened to kitchen waste, then to waste in general, and the word crossed to America and stayed there.
Garbage or trash?
In American usage garbage was wet, food waste and trash was dry. Today the two are used interchangeably in most places.
What is garbage collection in programming?
A system that automatically frees memory no longer in use, so the programmer does not have to release it by hand.