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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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.

From web, the format having been designed by Google for images on the web. No official expansion of the P has been published, so any gloss of it is guesswork.

An initialism of Scalable Vector Graphics.

An initialism of Portable Network Graphics.

A shortening of the file extension .jpeg to three characters, required by an older filename limit; JPEG itself is an acronym of Joint Photographic Experts Group.

An acronym of Joint Photographic Experts Group, the standards committee whose image-compression standard the format implements.

An initialism of Portable Document Format. The format was created at Adobe in the early 1990s and was published as an open ISO standard, ISO 32000, in 2008.

From the blue chip, traditionally the highest-value counter in poker.

diversification

From diversify, from Latin diversus meaning turned different ways, plus the noun ending -ation.

From net, meaning remaining after deductions, plus worth.

From mutual, in the sense of jointly owned by its members, plus fund.

From hedge in the financial sense of taking an offsetting position to limit losses, plus fund.

An initialism of return on investment.

compound interest

From compound, meaning combined or added together, plus interest, the charge or payment for the use of money; so named because each period's interest is added to the sum on which the next period's interest is worked out.

From capital in its financial sense of wealth held as assets, plus gain, an increase in value.

From the trading sense of short, meaning to owe something you do not currently hold, plus selling.

From bull, stock-market slang for someone buying in expectation of rising prices, plus market; formed as the counterpart to bear market.

From bear, long used in English stock-market slang for someone selling in expectation of falling prices, plus market.