What is Software Utility?

This question doesn't make sense to me (as a software engineer). It could mean two things....

1. The word "utility" can be used to simply mean "usefulness". You can talk about the utility of anything, a car has the utility to get you from place to place.

2. A simple tool used by programmers to get a specific job done is often called a "utility". At my company we have a bunch of little scripts (programs) we call utility that do little jobs for us outside of the main use of the software. For example... the user can use a website to update their information, that is the normal operation of our application. We can use a "utility" to clean things up if they make a mistake.