A design pattern that defers the loading of resources or objects until they are actually needed, rather than loading everything at initialization. This improves performance by reducing initial load time and memory usage.
The term emerged in the 1990s in object-oriented programming contexts, borrowing 'lazy' from mathematics where 'lazy evaluation' delays computation until results are needed. It became prominent in web development with the rise of image-heavy sites and single-page applications.
Lazy loading is like a smart waiter who only brings you the next course when you've finished the current one - no point overwhelming the table! Instagram uses this for images: you only download photos as you scroll to them, not all million photos in your feed at once.
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