The Origin and Meaning of "Software" in Computer Terminology
I was surprised that many users do not know what "software" is. I often see the question "What is soft?" in comments on my site. If you translate the word "soft" from English into Russian literally, you can get the following variants: "soft, gentle, quiet, light, weak, flexible...".
Everything depends on the context of the sentence. But the word "soft" has been firmly glued to programs and applications for quite a long time. What does it have to do with a computer and why are programs so weak and soft?
The word "soft" in the computer lexicon used to be called slightly differently, namely "software". If we were to turn to an English-Russian dictionary that was published about 50 years ago, there would be no such word in it. But we could translate it by splitting it into two words "soft" and "ware" and get a strange meaning too - "soft ware" or "soft products". However, a modern dictionary translates it as "software" or "computer programs". Why is this so?
As my university lecturer used to say - "English is a language of simplification due to its global recognition". Yes, language evolves in such a way that words are simplified to make them easier to operate. The fact is that the word "software" has an antonym, "hardware". We already know what "ware" is, and "hard" here in this case means "hard". The word itself translates to "hardware".
All physical hardware in a computer is called "hardware", and any software is called "software". You get this antagonism - like soft and hard.
Over time, again, for simplification, the word was shortened for the familiar to us "software". But the word "hard" does not refer to any computer part. This word has entered the lexicon in relation to the hard disk. I remember back in the early noughties, when my friends and I went to each other to download programs and games, we always said:
- Don't forget to bring the hard disk with you!
The word "software" has become so ingrained in computer jargon that it is not even worth putting it in quotation marks, as it is a full-fledged synonym for any software both on a computer and on a smartphone.
