Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Hypertext
/ˈhaɪpərtɛkst/noun
Text with embedded links that let a reader move through it in any order.
The Greek roots
ὑπέρ
hypér
over, beyond
Literally: “beyond-text”
Follow a root:ὑπέρ13 words
The story of the word
Ted Nelson coined it in 1965 for his Project Xanadu, and he meant text that had escaped the single sequence a page forces on it, not text that was somehow more textual than usual. Vannevar Bush had described the machine in 1945 and called the connections associative trails, but the word was Nelson's. ὑπέρ here is doing the mathematician's job of 'in more dimensions', as in hyperspace, which is where Nelson got it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1965
Same family
hyperlinkhyperbolehypothermiahyperactive
In a sentence
The first browser was a hypertext reader with almost nothing else in it.
Footnotes were hypertext waiting three centuries for a machine.