bubble sort n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries `bubble upward' in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by naive and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the canonical example of a naive algorithm. The canonical example of a really *bad* algorithm is bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful perversity.