Bombe
In short
An electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park to decipher German Enigma machine messages during World War II.
In plain words
It was a large machine built to speed up the process of finding the settings used to scramble secret messages. It worked by testing many possible combinations to break the German codes.
A simple example
A codebreaker would input known parts of a message into the Bombe to find the correct rotor positions. This allowed the Allies to read enemy communications much faster than doing it by hand.
Why it matters
The device played a vital role in shortening the war by providing intelligence on enemy movements. It was a key step in the development of modern computing and automated decryption.
Easy to mix up
Do not confuse it with the Polish bomba, which was the earlier machine that served as the design inspiration for the British version.