What is “overhead”?

Question

I am a student in Computer Science and I am hearing the word \"overhead\" a lot when it comes to programs and sorts. What does this mean exactly?

Answer 1

You're tired and cant do any more work. You eat food. The energy spent looking for food, getting it and actually eating it consumes energy and is overhead!

Overhead is something wasted in order to accomplish a task. The goal is to make overhead very very small.

In computer science lets say you want to print a number, thats your task. But storing the number, the setting up the display to print it and calling routines to print it, then accessing the number from variable are all overhead.