cruft /kruhft/ [very common; back-formation from crufty ] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from hand cruft , pun on hand craft ] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see hand-hacking ). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code. 5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says a cruft of hackers.