10 Tech Words With Origins That Will Make You Do a Double Take

Key Takeaways

• •The Bluetooth logo is Viking runes — the initials of King Harald Bluetooth
• •Richard Dawkins coined 'meme' in 1976 — 30+ years before internet memes
• •'Pixel' was named during the first lunar photography mission

BLUETOOTH

Named after Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, a 10th-century Danish Viking king who united warring tribes. The Bluetooth logo is his runic initials (H and B) merged together.

BUG

The first computer 'bug' was a literal moth found trapped in a Harvard Mark II relay in 1947. Grace Hopper's team taped it into the logbook with the note: 'First actual case of bug being found.'

WIKI

Means 'quick' in Hawaiian. Ward Cunningham named his 1995 WikiWikiWeb after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu Airport — the quickest way to get between terminals.

SPAM

Comes from Monty Python's 1970 sketch where Vikings repeatedly shout 'SPAM!' drowning out all conversation. Early internet users compared unwanted emails to Vikings drowning out the signal.

ROBOT

From the Czech word 'robota' meaning 'forced labor' or 'drudgery.' First appeared in Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), where artificial humans rebel against their creators.

PIXEL

A portmanteau of 'picture element,' coined in 1965 by Frederic Billingsley at JPL while processing images from the Ranger 7 lunar mission. We named the building block of digital images while photographing the moon.

COOKIE

Web cookies are named after 'magic cookies' — a Unix computing term from the 1970s for a token of data passed between programs. It was already tech jargon repurposed.

FIREWALL

Before computers, a firewall was a literal wall built to prevent fire from spreading between buildings. The metaphor of preventing dangerous traffic from spreading was too perfect not to adopt.

MEME

Coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book 'The Selfish Gene.' He meant a unit of cultural information that spreads like a gene. He had no idea it would come to mean cats with captions.

CAPTCHA

An acronym for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.' It was invented at Carnegie Mellon in 2003 — and reCAPTCHA later repurposed human effort to digitize books.

Every word in technology has a root. And those roots are often stranger, funnier, and older than you'd expect. Here are ten everyday tech words whose origins will surprise you.

BLUETOOTH — The next time you pair your AirPods, thank a 10th-century Viking. Bluetooth is named after Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, King of Denmark and Norway around 958 AD. Harald was famous for uniting warring Scandinavian tribes under one kingdom — exactly what the protocol does with devices. The Bluetooth logo? It's Harald's runic initials, H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ), superimposed on each other. The name was suggested by Intel engineer Jim Kardach, who was reading a historical novel about Vikings at the time.

BUG — Everyone knows this one, but the details are delightful. On September 9, 1947, operators of the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth trapped between relay contacts. Mathematician Grace Hopper's team literally taped the moth into the logbook with the caption: 'First actual case of bug being found.' The moth is still preserved at the Smithsonian. Debugging meant removing an actual bug.

WIKI — Ward Cunningham needed a name for his 1995 collaborative website. He remembered the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport — 'wiki wiki' means 'quick quick' in Hawaiian. The shuttle was the fastest way between terminals. His website was the fastest way to collaboratively edit knowledge. WikiWikiWeb → Wikipedia.

SPAM — In a 1970 Monty Python sketch, a group of Vikings in a restaurant repeatedly chant 'SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!' drowning out all other conversation. In the early 1990s, when unwanted messages flooded internet forums and inboxes, users compared the deluge to those Vikings drowning out the signal. The metaphor stuck.

ROBOT — This word is only 106 years old. Czech playwright Karel Capek introduced it in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which imagined artificial human workers. 'Robota' means 'forced labor' in Czech. In the play, the robots eventually rebel and overthrow humanity. We've been worried about AI taking our jobs since the word was invented.

PIXEL — In 1965, Frederic Billingsley at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was processing the first close-up photographs of the moon's surface, sent back by the Ranger 7 probe. He needed a term for the individual dots that made up the digital images. He shortened 'picture element' to 'pixel.' We named the fundamental unit of digital imagery while looking at the moon.

COOKIE — Web cookies aren't named after baked goods. They're named after 'magic cookies' — a term from 1970s Unix programming for a small token of data passed between programs. When Netscape engineer Lou Montulli needed a way to track web sessions in 1994, he reused the Unix term. Your browser cookies are named after a 1970s Unix inside joke.

FIREWALL — Before network security existed, a firewall was a physical wall built between buildings to prevent fire from spreading. The metaphor was too good to resist: a digital barrier that prevents dangerous traffic from spreading through a network. The term was first applied to networking in the late 1980s.

MEME — Richard Dawkins coined this word in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe a unit of cultural information that spreads and evolves like a biological gene. He derived it from the Greek 'mimeme' (imitated thing), shortened to sound like 'gene.' Dawkins was describing cultural evolution. He had absolutely no idea his word would come to mean cats with impact font.

CAPTCHA — It's an acronym: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Invented at Carnegie Mellon in 2003, it was later evolved into reCAPTCHA, which cleverly repurposed the human effort of solving puzzles to digitize old books and newspapers. Every time you identified a street sign to prove you're human, you were also training Google's self-driving car AI. The root loops back to Alan Turing's 1950 imitation game.

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