A description of the trail you took to arrive at your current location. Text breadcrumbs are common on websites to help users navigate the site. For example, breadcrumbs such as
Products->TVs->Plasma indicate that the Plasma TV Products page you are looking at was retrieved by first clicking
Products, then
TVs and then
Plasma.
From Hansel and Gretel
The term comes from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. When their father took them into the woods to abandon them, the children dropped crumbs of bread along the way to leave a trail back home.
Windows Breadcrumbs
Starting with Windows Vista, the Explorer file manager displays each element in the path to a file as a clickable breadcrumb. In the example above, any of the elements between the arrows can be clicked to jump to that level.