Wysiwyg is an acronym for a phrase written in the 1970s by Phillip Hahn. Phil was the head writer for Rowan & Martins Laugh-In, a popular television comedy show. The phrase was What You See Is What You Get. Then, it referred to Flip Wilsons female alter ego. Now, a WYSIWYG program is any computer program that allows you to see on the monitor screen exactly what your printer will produce on paper: What You See Is What You Get.
As with all occupations, the Internet has engendered its own, specific, often hard to understand, language.
The
Internet Dictionary is designed to help you wade through the overabundance of words that are new since the Internet began taking over our lives, or words that, applied to the computer, have come to mean something other than they once did.
This is a fun language, much of it invented or coined by computer engineers who populate centers like Silicon Valley, where working in corporate America means working in an atmosphere of hilarityof ROTFLOL. Thats Rolling On The Floor Laughing Out Loud, a slang term telling someone on the other end of an exchange that you found whatever he sent you hilarious. Its the equivalent of a standing ovation, with laughter.
If youre the parent of a teenager, it behooves you to acquire an
Internet slang dictionary. Your child is almost certainly more computer savvy than you are, and its hard to watch what hazards your child is risking if you dont have a clue what hes saying to that girlwho may not be a girl at allon the other side of the country. PLOS means Parent Looking Over Shoulder, TTFN, SYAHL is TaTa For Now, See You After He Leaves. Thats when shell get back to talking about sneaking out after bedtime to cruise the city streets with the boyfriend. This free Internet dictionary will help you keep up with the IM shorthand teens are using to get around their parents.
However, its not only teens whose language is foreign to traditional English. If you peruse the list of terms under A, youll soon run across the word Acrobat. An acrobat is a person skilled in feats of balance. Or its a family of programs produced under the name Adobe, and thats likely to be at least peripherally important to nearly everyone at some point in his life. An Acrobat PDF file is a document such as a tax return, which may be altered or added to on the computer and returned with the blanks filled in. If you play online games, you very likely use Adobe Acrobat animation programs.
When your software program suddenly crashes, leaving you wishing you had saved more frequently, it has abended, terminated abnormally. That ones not in the Websters University dictionary. Youll find it in the
free Internet dictionary.
