No Seriously, What Does Wi-Fi Stand For?

Get ready to find out!

Most of us know Wi-Fi as "something we panic about when we can't find."

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But have you ever thought about what Wi-Fi actually stands for?

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For awhile, a lot of people, including the U.S. military, thought it stood for "wireless fidelity."

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Which sounds like another term for being locked into your Verizon contract. But it doesn't stand for that.

But Wi-Fi actually stands for...nothing!

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*Which means it will fall for ANYTHING.

Phil Belanger, a member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, told Boing Boing that Wi-Fi is a nonsense word, not an acronym.

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"It is not an acronym. There is no meaning," Belanger said. "We (the founding members of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, now called the Wi-Fi Alliance) hired Interbrand to come up with the name and logo that we could use for our interoperability seal and marketing efforts. We needed something that was a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence.'"

"Wi-Fi" also sounds a lot like "Hi-Fi," which is of course slang for "high fidelity."

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And thus a moniker was born.

So Wi-Fi, like a lot of things on the internet, means and stands for absolutely nothing.

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