Sending just enough sporadic attention to keep someone interested, with no intent to commit.
The name comes straight from the fairy tale: a trail of crumbs that promises a way forward and leads absolutely nowhere. In dating, breadcrumbing is intermittent, low-effort contact designed to keep you warm without ever committing. The crumbs are small on purpose. Enough to keep you checking your phone; never enough to build anything.
The common misread is treating it as the same thing as someone being busy or just bad at texting. It isn't about volume, it's about the pattern. Busy people go quiet and then actually show up. A breadcrumber keeps the signal alive right up to the edge of you giving up — a reply to your story, a "haha miss you," a plan floated and never booked — and then goes dim again. Often it isn't even personal cruelty so much as keeping an option idling in the background. Which, from the receiving end, feels about the same.
On the apps it has a signature shape. The match that chats for three days and evaporates. The "hey stranger" that lands the exact week you were about to unmatch. If every conversation resets to zero and nothing ever converts into a real plan, you're not being courted. You're being kept.