BSOD

abbreviation or noun

ˌbē-ˌes-ˌō-ˈdē 

variants or less commonly BSoD

plural BSODs also BSoDs

: a screen (see screen entry 1 sense 4b) that usually consists of an error message displayed in white text on a solid blue background and that occurs when an electronic device has encountered an error from which it cannot recover : blue screen of death

… after the upgrade, customers may experience the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) intermittently, after the system is resumed from sleep or hibernate modes.

—Barry Collins

My own problems this morning, after the update sneaked in, saw my PC sit in a continual reboot cycle of BSODs pointing at memory, graphics card and other errors.

—Antony Leather

Mischievous magical forces quickly began interfering with my trainees' computers from Monday onwards, provoking more application freezes, system crashes and BSoDs during the first morning than I would normally expect in an average month.

—Alistair Dabbs

Examples of BSOD in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

To this day, networked PCs in macOS are represented by beige CRT monitors displaying a BSOD. —Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica, 7 Dec. 2023

Rest assured there aren’t any major BSOD changes coming to the Windows side at the moment. —Tom Warren, The Verge, 7 Dec. 2023

However, a growing list of users are commenting on Reddit that the update caused their computers to BSOD. —Matthew Humphries, PCMAG, 24 Aug. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1997, in the meaning defined above