What Does Wi-Fi Mean? - Learn Stuff

I`ve seen a lot of articles recently that claim the term Wi-Fi has no meaning. This surprised me, so I looked it up...

If you are like me, you probably just assumed that Wi-Fi is a take on Hi-Fi. The latter term is used for (usually older) sound systems and literally means \"high fidelity\".

The dictionary definition of fidelity is: \"the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced\". So in this context, \"high fidelity\" and \"wireless fidelity\" make perfect sense because of course it does.

What we call Wi-Fi has been around since the 90`s and the official name for the protocol is IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence. That`s quite a mouthful, so a marketing company was hired to come up with something more user friendly. Their answer was Wi-Fi.

The words \"wireless fidelity\" were literally used in publications and related websites by the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE - who developed the thing in the first place.

So yeah, it does stand for something: wireless fidelity. Which many of us thought in the first place.