A loop of leather or other material sewn at the top rear, or sometimes on each side, of a boot to help in pulling it on. He grabbed the bootstrap to pull on his new boots.
A self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help. The startup was a bootstrap operation, relying solely on its own revenue to grow.
A technique or process of starting a system or process from a small initial state. The computer's bootstrap process begins when you turn it on.
A statistical resampling technique that estimates the sampling distribution of an estimator by sampling with replacement from the original data. We used the bootstrap to calculate confidence intervals for the median.