This is a list of the origins of computer-related terms or terms used in the computing world (i.e., a list of computer term etymologies). It relates to both computer hardware and computer software.
Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles (programming language source code into the computer's machine language). However, there are other terms with less obvious origins, which are of etymological interest. This article lists such terms.
A
ABEND – originally from an IBM System/360 error message, short for "abnormal end". Jokingly reinterpreted as German Abend ("evening"), because "it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day."
Ada – named after Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the first programmer. Apache – originally chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache. It was suggested that the name was appropriate, as Apache began as a series of patches to code written for NCSA's HTTPd daemon. The result was "a patchy" server.
AWK – composed of the initials of its authors Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.
B
B – probably a contraction of "BCPL", reflecting Ken Thompson's efforts to implement a smaller BCPL in 8 KB of memory on a DEC PDP-7. Or, named after Bon.
biff – named after a dog known by the developers at Berkeley, who – according to the UNIX manual page – died on 15 August 1993, at the age of 15, and belonged to Heidi Stettner. Some sources report that the dog would bark at the mail carrier, making it a natural choice for the name of a mail notification system. The Jargon File contradicts this description, but confirms at least that the dog existed.
bit – first used by Claude E. Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Shannon's "bit" is a portmanteau of "binary digit". He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had used the word in a Bell Labs memo of 9 January 1947.
Bon – created by Ken Thompson and named either after his wife Bonnie, or else after "a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas" (a reference to the Tibetan native religion Bön). booting or bootstrapping – from the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", originally used as a metaphor for any self-initiating or self-sustaining process. Used in computing due to the apparent paradox that a computer must run code to load anything into memory, but code cannot be run until it is loaded. bug – often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. However, use of the word 'bug' to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s, perhaps especially in Scotland. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks and letters.Edison to Puskas, 13 November 1878, Edison papers, Edison National Laboratory, U.S. National Park Service, West Orange, N.J., cited in Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A History of the American Genius for Invention, Penguin Books, 1989, , on page 75. byte – coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer.
C
C – a programming language. Dennis Ritchie, having improved on the B language, named his creation New B. He later renamed it C. (See also D).
C++ – an object-oriented programming language, a successor to the C programming language. C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup named his new language "C with Classes" and then "new C". The original language began to be called "old C" which was considered insulting to the C community. At this time Rick Mascitti suggested the name C++ as a successor to C. In C the '++' operator increments the value of the variable it is appended to, thus C++ would increment the value of C.
computer – from the human computers who carried out calculations mentally and possibly with mechanical aids, now replaced by electronic programmable computers.
cookie – a packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server. The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers. The term "magic cookie" in turn derives from "fortune cookie", a cookie with an embedded message.
Carriage Return(CR) - The control character "carriage return" (CR) and its companion "line feed" (LF) originate from the mechanical workings of typewriters and early teleprinters. The carriage is the part of a typewriter that "carries" the paper horizontally for the next character to be typed. A "Carriage Return" was a mechanism to bring the carriage back to the beginning of the line. The "Line Feed" was a mechanism to move the paper vertically to the next line.
Cursor (user interface) - Cursor is Latin for 'runner.' A cursor is the name given to the transparent slide engraved with a hairline that is used for marking a point on a slide rule. The term was then transferred to computers through analogy.
D
D – a programming language. Designed by Walter Bright as an improved C, avoiding many of the design problems of C (e.g., extensive pointer manipulation, unenforced array boundaries, etc.).
daemon – a process in an operating system that runs in the background. It is not an acronym for Disk And Execution Monitor: according to the original team that introduced the concept, the use of the word daemon was inspired by the Maxwell's demon of physics and thermodynamics (an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules with differing velocities and worked tirelessly in the background). The term was embraced, and possibly popularized, by the Unix operating systems which supported multiple background processes: various local (and later Internet) services were provided by daemons. This is exemplified by the BSD mascot, John Lasseter's drawing of a friendly imp.
Dashboard - Originally, the word dashboard applied to a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves. The first known use of the term (hyphenated as dash-board, and applied to sleighs) dates from 1847. Commonly these boards did not perform any additional function other than providing a convenient handhold for ascending into the driver's seat, or a small clip with which to secure the reins when not in use. Debian – a Linux distribution. A portmanteau of the names Ian Murdock, the Debian Project creator, and Debra Lynn, Ian's then girlfriend and future wife.About Debian
default – an initial value for a variable or user setting. The original meaning of the word 'default' is 'failure to fulfill an obligation'. The obligation here is to provide an input that is required by a program. In the early days of programming, if an input value was missing, or 'null', the program would almost certainly crash. This is often to do with variable 'typing' – for example, a simple calculation program would expect a number as an input: any other type of input such as a text string or even a null (no value), would make any mathematical operation such as multiplication impossible. In order to guard against this possibility, programmers defined initial values that would be used if the user *defaulted* or failed to fulfill the obligation of providing the correct input value. Over time, the term 'default' has come to refer to the initial value itself.
E
Ethernet – a computer networking technology. According to Robert Metcalfe (one of its initial developers), he devised the name in an early company memo as an endocentric compound of "luminiferous ether"—the "substance" that was widely believed to be the medium through which electromagnetic radiation propagated in the late 19th century—and "net", short for "network". When the networking team would describe data flowing into the network infrastructure, they would routinely describe it as data packets going "up into the ether".
F
finger – Unix command that provides information about users logged into a system. Les Earnest wrote the finger program in 1971 to provide for users who wanted information about other users on a network or system. According to Earnest, it was named after the act of pointing, because it "bypassed the need to point to a user ID and ask, 'Who is that?'"
foobar – from the U.S. Army slang acronym, FUBAR. Both foo and bar are commonly used as metasyntactic variables.
Framework – The word "framework" originates from the field of architecture, where a framework refers to the structural skeleton of buildings. The derived figurative meaning used in computing is "a reusable code structure that provides a foundation for developing software applications".
G
Gentoo – a Linux distribution. Named after a variety of penguin, the universal Linux mascot.
Git – a distributed version control system. In the project's initial README file, Linus Torvalds wrote that "'git' can mean anything, depending on your mood", and offers several definitions: A random three-letter combination which is pronounceable and not a preexisting Unix command British English slang, meaning a stupid or contemptible person An acronym for "global information tracker" (when it works) An acronym for "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t" (when it breaks) When asked about the origin of the name, Torvalds jokingly stated, "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself."
GNU – a project with an original goal of creating a free operating system. Gnu (also called wildebeest) are a genus of African antelopes resembling cattle. The founder of the GNU project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with its pronunciation (officially, ), and was also influenced by The Gnu Song,The Gnu Song by Flanders and Swann, which is sung by a gnu. It is also an early example of a recursive acronym: "GNU's Not Unix".
Google – a search engine. The name started as an exaggerated boast about the amount of information the search engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word was originally invented by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, in 1938 during a discussion of large numbers and exponential notation.
Gopher – an early protocol for distributing documents over a network. Declined in favor of the World Wide Web. The name was coined by developer Farhad Anklesaria, as a play on , an assistant who fetches things, and a gopher, who digs, as if through nested hierarchies. The name was also inspired by Goldy Gopher, the mascot for the University of Minnesota where the protocol was developed.
grep – a Unix command line utility The name comes from a command in the Unix text editor ed that takes the form g/re/p meaning search globally for a regular expression and print lines where instances are found. "Grep" like "Google" is often used as a verb, meaning "to search".
H
Hotmail – free email service, now named Outlook.com. Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
I
i18n – short for "internationalization". "18" is for the number of letters between the i and the n. Related, less common terms include l10n (for localization), g11n (for globalization) and a11y (for accessibility).
ICQ – an instant messaging service.