English dictionary, thesaurus, translations & etymology

Etymology — The Origins of English Words

Where do words come from? Trace the origin and history of any English word, from its Latin, Greek or Old English roots through to its modern meaning. Every etymology is sourced.

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From over- plus clock, referring to the clock speed at which a chip is rated to run.

From cache, a hiding place, from French cacher, to hide, combined with memory.

A blend of firm and software, coined on the model of hardware and software to name code that sits between the two.

An acronym of basic input/output system.

An initialism of hard disk drive.

An initialism of solid-state drive, where solid-state refers to having no moving parts.

An initialism of graphics processing unit.

An initialism of central processing unit.

Named by John Gruber in 2004 as a play on markup, the general term for adding formatting instructions to plain text.

A recursive acronym for YAML Ain't Markup Language; it originally stood for Yet Another Markup Language.

A shortening of disk image.

An initialism of Android Package.

A shortening of executable.

From ppt, the older extension for a Microsoft PowerPoint file, plus x for XML, the text-based system used to store the file's contents.

From xls, the older extension for a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, plus x for XML, the text-based system used to store the file's contents.

From doc, short for document, plus x for XML, the text-based system used to store the file's contents.

An initialism of Rich Text Format.

A shortening of electronic publication.

An initialism of High Efficiency Image Container, the file extension used for images stored in the HEIF format.

A shortening of bitmap, the term for an image stored as a grid of individual pixels. It is a contraction rather than an initialism — the letters are not the initials of separate words.

An initialism of comma-separated values.

Short for Waveform Audio File Format; the file extension .wav gives the spoken form.

Short for MPEG-4 Part 14, from MPEG, an acronym of Moving Picture Experts Group.

Short for MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, from MPEG, an acronym of Moving Picture Experts Group.