Why Wiki?
The very old history of a very young word
The story behind every word is, ultimately, a gesture backwards into darkness.
Consider one of the most familiar coinages of recent decades: “wiki.” Wikis came into existence as a class of website in 1995, courtesy of American programmer Howard “Ward” Cunningham, who set out to devise a user-editable repository of knowledge aimed at making information exchange easier between programmers.
Cunningham christened his brainchild WikiWikiWeb, inspired — as he subsequently explained in correspondence with an etymologist and a lexicographer — by Hawaiian. “Wiki wiki,” he noted, was “the first Hawaiian term I learned on my first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals. I said what? He explained that wiki wiki meant quick.”
It was “an unusual word… for what was an unusual technology. I was not trying to duplicate any existing medium, like mail, so I didn’t want a name like electronic mail (email) for my work.” Hence the apt meaning of the world’s most famous wiki website, Wikipedia (launched in 2001), which means literally “quick education” via a combination of Cunningham’s coinage with the ancient Greek paedia.
“Wiki” may have been new to English, but it was part of a language spoken on the Hawaiian islands for at least two millennia by their original Polynesian settlers — although Hawaiian had no written form until the arrival of 19th-century Calvinist missionaries.
Polynesia itself contains over forty languages, contained within the larger Austronesian family of around 1,200 languages, which in turn are thought to have developed from the reconstructed language Proto-Austronesian, brought to southeast Asia and the Pacific some five or six thousand years ago (probably via what is now China).
This wasn’t the beginning either, of course. Historically, linguists have tended to assume that individual words do not have life spans of over 10,000 years, thanks to the constant processes of language change. Recently, however, a number of “ultraconserved” words have been proposed by an American study, which suggests that some terms from a “Eurasiatic superfamily” of languages have persisted largely unchanged for 15,000 years — including “I,” “not,” “that,” “mother,” and “fire” (the Eurasiatic family doesn’t include Austronesian, but a similar reconstruction could theoretically be attempted).
Even fifteen thousand years is barely the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. The story of human language, as I’ve explored elsewhere, is largely a tale of darkness of silence: of hundreds of thousands of years across which, somehow, the genus of great apes that would become modern humans ascended into an unprecedented and (so far as we know) unique articulacy.
We will never be able to tell most of that story. Yet we know its conclusion: seven billion of us, suffusing the world with our words, surrounded by technologies that often seem to have popped into existence outside of conventional history and its timescales.
If we think and read closely enough, words can help us to unpick this illusion — or at least be a little more humble — by reminding us of the human stories and ancient chains of consequence behind every phrase we type.
