Have you ever ever thought of the place the time period Wi-Fi comes from? Most individuals would logically assume it’s a shortened model of some extremely technical description for the tech that allowed computer systems to entry the web wirelessly. However these folks can be fallacious.
The time period Wi-Fi isn’t an abbreviated model of wi-fi constancy, as many individuals consider. Wi-Fi is a pun on Hello-Fi, which was coined within the Nineteen Fifties by audio tools producers as a shortened model of “excessive constancy.” However there’s no such factor as wi-fi constancy. It’s only a snappy identify invented by entrepreneurs.
TikTok account That’s Pretty Cool, which usually shares completely different enjoyable details, not too long ago made a brief video concerning the origins of wi-fi and, as Huffpost UK notes, the feedback in that TikTok point out many individuals had been shocked. Different commenters mentioned they didn’t just like the time period when it first got here out, which might be a well-known sentiment to anybody who remembers the backlash towards “podcast” within the 2000s and iPad within the 2010s.
The concept that Wi-Fi truly means “wi-fi constancy” has been circulating on the web since a minimum of 2005, when Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing debunked that fable. In actuality, the time period was created by the advertising and marketing agency Interbrand, which additionally got here up with the model names for the anti-depressant Prozac and the pc firm Compaq.
“The technical time period was IEEE 802.11, however that simply wouldn’t do,” Interbrand explains on its website. “The identify needed to be memorable—one thing common you could possibly discover in your dwelling, the workplace, a espresso store, or on public transit and one thing that helped shoppers intuitively perceive the idea.”
They landed on Wi-Fi, enjoying off the time period Hello-Fi, which everybody was already nicely aware of by the late Nineties. There was truly a film in 2000 referred to as High Fidelity starring John Cusack, who performs a music-obsessive who owns a report retailer.
However though it doesn’t inherently imply something, the branding was extremely profitable at speaking the concept that you could possibly get wi-fi web with none type of cable, a radical concept for many People shoppers of the Nineties who had been simply beginning to get on-line in a significant approach.
“The identify displays that, even with out cables, Wi-Fi delivers a high-quality, lossless connection wherever you go,” Interbrand writes. “Since its launch, Wi-Fi has turn out to be globally synonymous with wi-fi accessibility anyplace. It’s seamlessly entered into languages throughout the globe —everytime you want wi-fi web, you ask for Wi-Fi.”
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