Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

Double-you double-you double-you

octubre 24th, 2008 · No hay Comentarios

The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and released in 1992. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic web.

In English, “WWW” is pronounced “double-you double-you double-you”.

The English actor, comedian, writer, and geek who writes a column in The Guardian about digital devices weekly, Stephen Fry, finds amusing how we waste our breath on saying double-you double-you double-you.

Have you ever wondered why we say “double-you double-you double-you”? I mean, that letter, W, is three syllables, World Wide Web is three syllables, so WWW is nine syllables! It is three times longer to say WWW than it is to say World Wide Web! In the early days, around ‘94, I remember it was quite common to call it “double you three” but even that’s four syllables! So what’s wrong with saying World Wide Web?

And why am I on this subject…?

Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering myself…

      

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