breadcrumb trailn.
/ˈbrɛdkrʌm treɪl/, U.S. /ˈbrɛdˌkrəm ˌtreɪl/ 1. A trail of breadcrumbs or other markers left along a complicated or labyrinthine route, by means of which the person laying the trail may be followed or the route may be retraced to its starting point. Also frequently figurative: a series of (typically deliberately placed) clues or pieces of information or evidence. See breadcrumb n. 3a.
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1969 J. Sakol Gumdrop, Gumdrop, let down your Hair vi. 196 Not a sign of Gumdrop and Coral, not a single chalked arrow or breadcrumb trail.
1980 Hartford (Connecticut) Courtant 21 Sept. g8/2 Faulkner's use of other writers' phrases and ideas left a kind of breadcrumb trail for literary critics of what the young author was reading.
2003 Pop. Sci. Feb. 56/1 The Dorado..will fire sonobuoy probes into the underside of the Arctic ice sheet, leaving what Bellingham calls a bread-crumb trail.
2. Computing. A display of the location of a file, folder, web page, etc., typically in the form of a list in the address bar of a browser window, which shows the position of the item that has been accessed within a hierarchical structure, or the order in which a number of items have been accessed.
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1987 Patricia Seybold's Office Computing Rep. July 17/2 Owl is working on a way of graphically representing where the reader is, a ‘bread-crumb’ trail to facilitate backtracking. The user can easily return to the top-level command with the Reset button.
2015 J. Campbell Web Design (ed. 5) 106 Use a breadcrumb trail to help a user find his or her way back to pages previously viewed in the website.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2020; most recently modified version published online December 2021).
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