We live in a world with a lot of tech acronyms and brand names that can be a little hard to actually understand if you're not used to them.
You can reel off an endless list of names for things that would sound like gobbledygook to someone from 100 years ago, from Bluetooth and iOS to LiDAR or GPS, but the fact is that most of these have some sort of reasoning behind them.
Take GPS - that stands for Global Positioning System - which makes a lot of sense. Or LiDAR - that's short for Light Detection and Ranging, which again is sensible stuff.
Advert
One word that many of us use every day, though, whether to share a password with a guest or to complain about our internet speed being unreliable, is a little less clear: Wi-Fi.
It's a word that can be spelt WiFi or Wi-Fi depending on your taste, but regardless of that little dash in the middle, you may left without a definitive answer if you wanted to figure out its etymology.
Some people might logically assume that it is a shortening of something, perhaps starting with the word 'Wireless' and ending with 'Fidelity'. That would make some sense given that early Wi-Fi marketing did use those words to sell the technology.
However, both of those words are ultimately red herrings - the truth turns out to be even more mundane than that, and a little frustrating too.
Way back in 2005, Canadian-British author and journalist Cory Doctorow, editor of the blog Boing Boing, wrote a post in which he talked to Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, which certifies Wi-Fi products and has been doing so for more than 25 years.
Belanger told Doctorow in no uncertain terms that the name Wi-Fi didn't mean anything specific, and was in fact basically a marketing concoction. As he said: "We needed something that was a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'".
The Alliance hired a branding agency called Interbrand to help with the problem, and later in the process, "we chose the name Wi-Fi from a list of 10 names that Interbrand proposed".
In fact, Belanger even explained that a marketing tagline: "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity", was invented after the name was selected, purely because "some of my colleagues in the group were afraid. They didn't understand branding or marketing. They could not imagine using the name 'Wi-Fi' without having some sort of literal explanation".
So, while the words 'Wireless' and 'Fidelity' became entangled with Wi-Fi for a while, there was in fact no actual connection, and the tagline was dropped after a few years anyway.
This means that you have a new trick question up your sleeve, though - ask someone what Wi-Fi stands for, and you'll be able to stump them before revealing that it stands for absolutely nothing.