bootstrapping
bootstrapping Lexical Profile
bootstrapping Game Scores & Validity
• noun
The practice of founding and growing a business using only personal finances or the operating revenue of the new company, without relying on external venture capital or outside investment.
"Through careful bootstrapping, the founders retained full ownership of their software company until it became profitable."
A self-starting process in computing in which a simple initial program loads and executes a more complex system, such as an operating system or compiler.
"The system administrator diagnosed an error during the bootstrapping phase that prevented the server from loading its kernel."
A statistical resampling technique that estimates the properties of a sampling distribution by repeatedly drawing random samples with replacement from an existing dataset.
"The researchers used bootstrapping to calculate confidence intervals for their small sample size."
• verb
To start or build up an enterprise, project, or system using existing personal resources and generated revenue without outside help or capital (present participle of bootstrap).
"They have been bootstrapping their design agency from a home office for the past two years."
To initialize or load a computer system or compiler using a small, self-sustaining sequence of initial instructions (present participle of bootstrap).
"The engineers spent the afternoon bootstrapping the new compiler onto the target hardware."
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
Derived from the 19th-century idiom "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps," which originally described a physically impossible feat before evolving to mean succeeding through one's own unaided effort.