A tiny bit of near-random data inserted where too much regularity would be undesirable a data frob (sense 1). For example, the Unix crypt(3) manual page mentions that "the salt string is used to perturb the DES algorithm in one of 4096 different ways."

In addition suitable contents:
[ = ] [ ag ] [ al ] [ algorithm ] [ alt ] [ am ] [ an ] [ ar ] [ arc ] [ arity ] [ at ] [ b ] [ be ] [ bi ] [ bit ] [ ch ] [ cr ] [ crypt ] [ D ] [ data ] [ de ] [ DES ] [ diff ] [ do ] [ du ] [ E ] [ ed ] [ eg ] [ er ] [ es ] [ fi ] [ file ] [ fr ] [ frob ] [ ge ] [ gu ] [ h ] [ hat ] [ hm ] [ hr ] [ id ] [ iff ] [ il ] [ in ] [ io ] [ ir ] [ is ] [ it ] [ la ] [ ld ] [ Lex ] [ lt ] [ ma ] [ man ] [ mo ] [ mod ] [ module ] [ mp ] [ mu ] [ na ] [ ne ] [ ng ] [ ni ] [ ns ] [ nu ] [ om ] [ pa ] [ page ] [ pe ] [ ph ] [ pl ] [ pt ] [ query ] [ random ] [ rc ] [ re ] [ ro ] [ S ] [ sa ] [ se ] [ si ] [ st ] [ string ] [ th ] [ to ] [ tr ] [ ua ] [ us ]