monkey patch

English

Alternative forms

• monkeypatch, monkey-patch

Etymology

Apparently from earlier guerrilla patch (“code that sneakily changes other code”), understood as gorilla patch. A monkey patch was then a more carefully written instance of such a patch. Or simply derived from monkey (“to mess with”, verb).

Noun

monkey patch (plural monkey patches)

1. (programming slang) A patch which alters the behaviour of a program by forcibly overriding aspects of the original code at runtime.

Verb

monkey patch (third-person singular simple present monkey patches, present participle monkey patching, simple past and past participle monkey patched)

1. (programming slang, transitive) To alter the behaviour of a program by forcibly overriding aspects of the original code at runtime.
   • 2007, Philip C. Plumlee, Test Driven Ajax (on Rails):

     Even though that works with some browsers, others provide Anchor objects without click() methods. Add this magic code to your application.js, to Monkey Patch a JavaScript click() event:

Further reading

• monkey patch on Wikipedia.Wikipedia