Ever wondered why you “boot” a computer, or why websites ask you to accept “cookies”? Wonder no more.

From booting to Bluetooth, the jargon of computing appears so frequently in our everyday conversations that you've probably never taken time to wonder where those terms came from. But we've looked into it, and whether you're a tech enthusiast or casual smartphone user, we think you'll enjoy learning the unlikely origins of these familiar computer-centric names and phrases.

1. BOOTING

We boot and reboot our computers every day – but why “booting”? The term is a shortened form of the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. This early-19th century expression means performing an apparently impossible task (in the original sense, it refers to an attempt to lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your shoelaces). It was co-opted by early computer developers because starting a computer also involves an apparently impossible task: a computer must run code to load anything into its memory, but you can't load anything into memory without running code.

As such it took a variety of techniques and interventions to boot the first computers, and while the problem was eventually solved by the creation of read-only memory (which contained code that didn't need to be loaded because it existed permanently in memory) the name nonetheless stuck.

2. BUG

The story behind why computers have “bugs” is so perfect that it's almost certainly apocryphal in some way, though we hope it isn't: In 1946, Grace Hopper traced an error in the Harvard Mark II computer to a moth trapped in one of the relays. The bug was removed and taped to the log book for posterity, which led to an in-joke about errors being caused by “a bug” in the system.

Today “debugging” means to test a system and locate errors for removal – but in 1946, for this particular case at least, it meant literally removing a bug from the computer.

3. BLUETOOTH

This wireless technology is named after a Scandanavian king, Harald Bluetooth, who was the first to unite the Danish tribes into a single country. Bluetooth technology, like the king, was supposed to “unite” different tribes – though in thise case that meant computers and mobile phones – with a single communication standard. The name was suggested in 1997 by Jim Kardach, and successfully so – it's still around today despite the protocol's general unreliability.

As an extra easter egg, take a look at the Bluetooth logo: it combines the two runic initals of Harald Bluetooth's name, so that they appear to form a “B”.

4. COOKIE

Coined by Lou Montulli, who co-developed one of the earliest web browsers (the text-based Lynx), the term cookie ultimately derives from Fortune Cookie – yes, as in, the Chinese food – because both are objects containing a small embedded message.

5. ETHERNET

Robert Metcalfe helped develop Ethernet and claims to have named it after the “luminiferous ether”, which was part of a late-19th Century theory about the nature of the universe. The “ether” was believed to be the fundamental structure of reality (roughly equivalent to the modern understanding of spacetime) which would allow light – then thought to be a simple wave – to travel through the apparent vaccuum of space against the known laws of physics.

Ethernet combines it with the word “network”, following the same standard technical abbreviation that gives us the word internet.

6. MAC

You probably know that Mac is a shortened form of Apple Macintosh – but where did that name come from? It's a reference to an actual fruit: the McIntosh apple. Jef Raskin, the Apple employee in charge of the original project, named the forthcoming computer after the popular North American fruit variety as a pun on the company's name.

The apple itself was named after farmer John McIntosh after he discovered the original sapling on his land in 1811 and decided it was sufficiently delicious to produce commercially. For reference, Steve Jobs claims to have come up with Apple's company name after visiting an apple farm while on a fruitarian diet and deciding that the name Apple sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

7. WIKI

If you're a fan of facts and trivia (and if you're not, what are you even doing this far down the article?) you probably make weekly, even daily visits to Wikipedia, which is so-named because it's an encyclopaedia run on a Wiki. A Wiki is a software system that allows people to quickly and collaboratively create and edit webpages directly on the web server. The concept was named by programmer Ward Cunningham, taking inspiration from the “wiki wiki bus” at Honolulu Airport. Wiki is Hawaiian for “fast”.