Wiki

Wiki

'Wiki' – W-I-K-I. There can’t be many people left who haven’t heard of Wikipedia. At least not many who have access to the internet. But ask them what a ‘wiki’ is, and there’s a good chance you’ll be met with a blank look and a scratch of the head.

But what is Wikipedia? If you’ve followed this series from the beginning, you’ll have already seen some examples of words which are formed by blending two words together. This is another example – OK, I get the '-pedia' part – that’s from encyclopedia, right? Yes, but what about the wiki? In fact it’s the 'wiki' part which is the USP (unique selling point) of Wikipedia. It means that anyone can contribute their own information and content to the site. It’s open to anybody, anywhere at any time.

The ‘wiki’ part is actually a Hawaiian word meaning ‘quickly’. Ward Cunningham, the man credited with developing the wiki concept for the internet, was at Honolulu airport in Hawaii and was told to take the ‘wiki wiki bus’. He was understandably confused and when he asked what it meant was told it simply meant the quick bus. He liked it so much he decided to name his new web project after it.

Basically, wikis are websites which are very easy to set up, because they generally use WYSIWYG tools (see Series 2) and they can then be edited by anybody – you don’t have to be the creator of the site to add more content. They are used in education, for class projects, in business and even in politics.

But the open nature of wikis and their ease of use can be a disadvantage. In 2006 the UK government department for environment, food and rural affairs (DEFRA) set up a wiki to invite discussion about new environmental policies. Unfortunately, not all the contributions were entirely serious. In reply to the question, 'What tools can be used to deliver the environmental contract?' one contributor wrote: 'Spade, Organic Yoghurt Stirrer, Old washing up liquid bottle, Sticky Back Plastic'.

At the time some reports of the story were along the lines of ‘Hackers deface government website’, a headline which totally missed the point that the key to wikis is the fact that they are open and can be added to by anybody and that’s exactly what happened in this case. The UK government might think twice before setting up another wiki.

Widget

Widget

'Widget' - W-I-D-G-E-T. Widget. It has a nice, friendly sound to it. It sounds a bit like it should be a small animal or bird. But it isn’t. What is it then?

A widget can be many things, but most recently the word has come to describe small applications which run on your computer. You might have been given the option to download a widget and wondered what it meant. Widgets can have all sorts of functions – you can download a weather widget, so you can predict the weather (never an exact science in the UK!) or a calendar widget, or a twitter widget. You name it, there’s probably a widget out there which does it.

I first remember hearing the word in the early 1990s from a series of beer adverts. The great thing about the beer’s new can was that it had a widget inside it. This meant that when you opened the can, the beer came out like a draught beer, the beer you get on tap in a pub. How it did this was a mystery to most people. All we knew was that it contained a widget.

'Widget' is thought to have come from the word 'gadget'. The original meaning of this seems to be to describe something that you couldn’t think of the word for. According to some etymologists (people who research the origins of words), 'widget' was a variation of the word 'gadget' which arose in the 1920s or 1930s in the US. Before this, the word 'gadget' seems to have been used by British sailors in the mid to late 19th century to describe something which they had forgotten the word for. Used in this way it may have come from a French word ‘gachette’, meaning a type of lock mechanism. Nobody really seems sure. What we can say though, about both ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’ is that they are normally used for something which is not easy to define exactly, something usually mechanical or more recently in relation to computers.

One of the more intriguing possible origins of the word ‘widget’ can be found in the Routledge dictionary of historical slang which lists the word ‘wifflow-gadget’. The meaning of this and another nice expression ‘hook-me-dinghy’ is apparently ‘anything whose right name has temporarily slipped one’s mind’.

Widgetry, the art of designing widgets, has given rise to a couple more new words, for example, 'widgeteer' – a person who designs widgets, and 'to widgetize' – the process of turning something into a widget.

Tweet

Tweet

'Tweet'. The booming popularity of online social networking sites has given the English language a bumper crop of new words. Although some of these sites, and the words associated with them, may prove to be short-lived, here today and gone tomorrow, there are others, such as Facebook ,which seem to be here to stay.

The latest ‘big thing’ in the world of digital media is Twitter, a social networking site which began back in 2006 and has been growing ever since. Users post short ‘micro-blogs’ (messages) called ‘tweets’ - T-W-E-E-T-S - from their mobile phone or computer to let other people know what they’re doing or to ask a question.

The difference between these and a normal text message or email is that a ‘tweet’ is ‘out there’ in cyberspace, no more than 140 characters long and can be read or answered by anybody on the network. Just like the words ‘google’ and ‘facebook’, ‘tweet’ can be used as a noun or a verb. Twitter is increasingly used for market research, so many companies are now asking themselves ‘To tweet or not to tweet?’

The popularity of Twitter grew after it was used by US presidential candidates before the 2008 election to keep their ‘followers’ up to date – Barack Obama had hundreds of thousands of followers during the election campaign, although he seemed to stop tweeting shortly after the election. I guess he must have been quite busy!

Twitter has spawned a number of related words such as ‘twestival’ (a gathering organised on Twitter) and ‘twirgin’ (someone who is new to Twitter or a first-time user). In fact, if you see an unfamiliar word which starts with a TW- prefix, it’s probably a new word coined by the Twitter community. Some of these words may not make it into the dictionaries, but Twitter seems set to live on.