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 Latin serum, meaning whey or watery fluid.

hyaluronic acid

From hyaloid, meaning glassy, plus uronic acid, reflecting the sugar units the molecule is built from.

From retina plus the chemical suffix -ol, used for alcohols.

From seed in the sense of a starting value from which the wallet's keys are generated, plus phrase, since it takes the form of a sequence of words.

From hot in the sense of live or connected, contrasted with cold storage kept offline.

From cold storage, the idea of keeping something offline and out of reach, contrasted with a hot, or connected, wallet.

Coined by American computer scientist Nick Szabo in 1996.

From gas in the sense of fuel, by analogy with the fuel a vehicle consumes: the amount of computing work a transaction uses is measured in units called gas.

A blend of token and economics.

A figurative use of the military sense of airdrop, delivering supplies by parachute, applied to tokens sent out to many wallets at once.

Coined by Russian-Canadian computer scientist Vitalik Buterin after browsing a list of fictional elements on Wikipedia; based on ether.

A compound of stable and coin, so called because it is designed to hold a steady value.

A compound of alternative and coin, meaning a coin offered as an alternative to Bitcoin.

A blend of decentralised finance, shortening de- from decentralised and fi from finance.

An initialism of non-fungible token, where fungible means interchangeable with another of the same kind.

A compound of block and chain, from the way records are grouped into blocks that are each linked to the one before, forming a chain.

A shortening of cryptocurrency, itself from crypto- (from Greek kruptos, hidden) plus currency, so named because the system relies on cryptography.

From de- meaning to remove, plus bug in the sense of a fault or defect in a machine, an engineering usage that predates computing.

A compound of open and source, from source code, the human-readable form of a program before it is compiled or run.

An initialism of internet protocol address, from the internet protocol, the set of rules that governs how data is addressed and routed between networked devices.

An initialism of virtual private network.

An initialism of file transfer protocol, one of the earliest internet standards, in use since the early 1970s.

A compound of site and map.

A shortening of inline frame, the name of the HTML element.