{"id":75621,"date":"2024-08-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/?p=75621"},"modified":"2024-07-25T16:16:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T23:16:50","slug":"history-of-internet-terms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/en\/internet-culture\/history-of-internet-terms\/","title":{"rendered":"Browsers, cookies and surfing the web: The quirky history of internet lingo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Dr. Erica Brozovsky is a sociolinguist, a public scholar and a lover of words. She is the host of Otherwords<\/a>, a PBS series on language and linguistics, and a professor of writing and rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. You can find her at @ericabrozovsky on most platforms. Photo: Kelly Zhu<\/em>\n<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The internet is ubiquitous: on our desks, in our pockets, even in the air around us, as radio waves transmit between devices so we can be online on the move. It\u2019s a sprawling web of interconnectivity, linking people and gadgets around the world. When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> wrote his first proposal for a hypertext project called WorldWideWeb in 1989, there\u2019s no way he could have known the impact his invention would have on billions of people across the globe, which he confirmed in a 2014 Reddit AMA<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 35 years since the invention of the World Wide Web, an explosion of new internet words has emerged. As new technologies develop, we adopt words or create novel ones to fill in the linguistic gaps. For example, to describe one of the advancements of the Industrial Revolution, the word train<\/em> was extended from its older definitions as a procession or sequence of objects in a row. And the steam-powered vehicle pulling a train of railway cars? That brand new technology needed an innovative name: locomotive<\/em>. People often incorrectly think locomotives and trains are synonymous, and are similarly mistaken with the internet and the World Wide Web. To keep the transportation analogy going, the internet is the railway system, the data that moves between sites or sends emails is the train, and the World Wide Web is the scenery and points of interest along the route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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WWW’s “historical” logo, created by Robert Cailliau in 1990. Source: Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
As far as names go, internet and World Wide Web make sense. The words visualize interconnectedness. Other internet terms like bookmark<\/em>, which functions digitally the same way as a tangible piece of material is used to denote a place in a book, and email<\/em> (an abbreviation of electronic mail), show clear parallels in meaning to their analog counterparts. Websites<\/em> are locations, or sites, on the web. Domains<\/em> are subsets of the internet under the control of a single authority, much like a physical territory that a ruler would have dominion over. And if you know that the prefix hyper-<\/em> means above or beyond, you\u2019ll understand that hypertext and hyperlinks essentially go beyond the constraints of normal text and links. But not all internet words are so etymologically evident, and some even come with stories. Let\u2019s start at the very beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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If you know that the prefix hyper- means above or beyond, you\u2019ll understand that hypertext and hyperlinks essentially go beyond the constraints of normal text and links. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
When you access the internet, you open a browser (which first appeared as the acronym BROWSER for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval) and begin to navigate around, otherwise known as surfing the internet<\/em>. The term is often attributed to librarian Jean Armour Polly, who wanted a pithy metaphor for the fun and chaos of navigating the online world for her 1992 article\u2019s title. Polly wasn\u2019t the only one with a penchant for riding waves online: a 1991 comic book \u201cThe Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy\u201d published by CERFnet depicted a superhero who literally surfed around on a surfboard answering internet cries for help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n