bootstrap
noun
a loop of leather or cloth sewn at the top rear, or sometimes on each side, of a boot to facilitate pulling it on.
bootstrapped
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past participleof bootstrap.past participle
A verb form used in perfect and passive verb constructions and that can also function as a modifier.
-
past tense formof bootstrap.past tense
Used to describe completed actions or previous habitual actions.
bootstrapnouna loop of leather or cloth sewn at the top rear, or sometimes on each side, of a boot to facilitate pulling it on.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But he’s bootstrapped himself into intelligence and with savvy networking and know-how, he becomes indispensable to the British, volunteering as a major to survey land and negotiate treaties with the Native tribes and French army.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 2, 2026
Migrating to another cloud provider or implementing a multi-cloud strategy would likely be too costly for a bootstrapped startup like his.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2025
The sale, announced last week, caps an impressive career by Ng, a scrappy, diminutive septuagenarian who used her bootstrapped community newspapers “to empower the Asian American community” as she put it this week.
From Seattle Times ● May 29, 2024
“We watched the pilot, and we were extremely impressed with how she’d bootstrapped this and essentially made it herself,” Ravi Nandan, the head of television at A24, said in an interview.
From New York Times ● Jan. 22, 2024
But many of these smaller livestream channels are more bootstrapped operations, adherent to the same grind culture their content facilitates.
From Slate ● Sep. 2, 2023
