what does www stand for

WWW stands for World Wide Web.

Quick Scoop: What “www” Really Means

• Full form: WWW = World Wide Web.

• It refers to the huge collection of linked web pages and resources you visit through a browser over the internet.

• The “www” part in a web address is technically just a subdomain, originally used to show “this server is for web pages.”

In simple terms: the internet is the global network of computers; the World Wide Web is the system of websites that runs on top of it.

A Tiny Bit of Backstory

• The term World Wide Web was coined by Tim Berners-Lee around 1989 for his hypertext system at CERN.

• Early websites used the “www” prefix to clearly mark that a particular machine or service was serving web content (via HTTP), not email, files, or something else.

Do We Still Need “www” Today?

• Many modern sites work with or without “www”; the browser or server usually redirects you automatically.

• Technically, “www.example.com” and “example.com” can be configured as separate hosts, but most site owners treat them as the same for convenience and branding.

Short example

When you type www.techtarget.com into your browser, the “www” is just telling it, in the old-school way, “go to the web server for this domain on the World Wide Web.”

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.