What is the meaning of bootstrapping?

For financial risk mangers,' bootstrapping' means (1) the procedure where coupon bonds are used to generate the set of zero-coupon bond prices, or (2) the use of historical returns to create an empirical probability distribution for returns. Bootstrapping is an iterative calculation technique, often used in the construction of specialized time series. For example, the calculation of forward rates from traditional yield curves uses an iterative process to extract the implied rate for each forward period. The term is used in other ways in other contexts.