To edit her photos, she needs to install the newest ____ on her computer.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
You need to install the latest ____ update to ensure that your computer remains secure and fast.
Word Origin & History
Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *sem-
Proto-Germanic *samþuz /*samftuz
Proto-Germanic *-jaz
Proto-West Germanic *-ī
Proto-West Germanic *samft(ī)
Old English sōfte
Middle English softe
English soft
Proto-Germanic *warō
Proto-West Germanic *waru
Old English waru
Middle English ware
English -ware
English software
Computing sense from soft + -ware, by contrast with hardware (“the computer itself”). Coined by John Tukey in 1958. The earlier sense of software to mean tangible products with a soft texture may have fallen out of common usage before the computing sense was created.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"As originally conceived, the word "software" was merely an obvious way to distinguish a program from the computer itself. A program comprised sequences of changeable instructions each having the power to command the behavior of the permanently crafted machinery, the "hardware.""
— 1995, Paul Niquette, Softword: Provenance for the Word ‘Software’:
"Cris “Space Rogue” Thomas, another ex-L0pht member who testified alongside Zatko that day, said that L0pht would do everything it could to get companies to collaboratively fix software issues the hacker group found."
— 2022 October 17, Sean Lyngaas and Clare Duffy, “How a 51-year-old celebrity hacker upended one of the world’s most influential social networks”, in CNN Business:
"The Americans have devoted their attention to the hardware of disarmament: Europeans can make a special contribution to the 'software' or human content of detente."
— 1989, Christopher Layton, A Step Beyond Fear: Building a European Security Community:
"[…] preview of horrific images to come, as the hardware stage of the war yields to the software — or human — stage."
— 1991, New York Magazine, volume 24, number 5, page 33:
"[…] an extremely long playing time is achieved, which might be unnecessary from a software point of view"
— 1979 December 6, Toshi T. Doi, Takashi Itoh, Hiroshi Ogawa, “A Long-Play Digital Audio Disk System”, in Journal of the AES, volume 27, number 12, pages 975–981: