IT Glossary
Key Terms To Know In The IT Industry

WPA2-Personal

A version of WPA2 designed for home and small office networks, providing good security without the complexity of RADIUS authentication.

You will find this term commonly used in Wireless Security

WPA3 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 3)

The third iteration of the Wi-Fi Protected Access security protocol, providing enhanced security features for wireless networks.

You will find this term commonly used in Security, Networking

Wrapper Class

In programming, a class whose instances are collections of other objects. It allows the grouping of objects as a single unit.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

Wrapper Function

A function whose main purpose is to call a second function, often used to simplify complex function calls or to adapt them to a specific interface.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT/Programming

Write Amplification

A phenomenon in flash memory and solid-state drives where the actual amount of physical information written is a multiple of the logical amount intended to be written.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

Write Coalescing

A technique used in computer storage to improve performance by combining multiple write commands into a single larger command before writing to the disk.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

Write Protection

A physical or software mechanism that prevents modification or deletion of data on a device or medium.

You will find this term commonly used in Cybersecurity

Write-Ahead Logging (WAL)

A method used in databases to ensure data integrity by recording changes to data before it is actually made to the database.

You will find this term commonly used in Databases

Write-Back Cache

A caching technique in which data is written to cache alone and not immediately to the backing storage, improving performance.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT/Networking

Write-Once Memory

A type of non-volatile memory that can be written once and then read many times, used for secure data storage.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

Write-Once, Run Anywhere (WORA)

A principle of software development that enables code to run on any platform without needing to be rewritten.

You will find this term commonly used in Software Development

Write-Protect

A mechanism that prevents the modification or deletion of data on a device or in a file.

You will find this term commonly used in Data Security

Write-Through Cache

A caching method where operations write data to both the cache and the backing storage, ensuring data consistency.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT/Networking

WYSIWYG

An acronym for "What You See Is What You Get," referring to software that allows content to be edited in a form resembling its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT, User Interface

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)

A user interface that allows users to view a document or webpage exactly as it will appear when printed or displayed.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

WYSIWYG Editor

A system in which content (text and graphics) can be edited in a form closely resembling its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as in word processors or web content management systems.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

X Window Manager

An X Window Manager is a software component that controls the placement and appearance of windows in the X Window System. It provides window decorations, desktop management, and user interaction features to enhance the usability of graphical desktop environments.

You will find this term commonly used in Operating Systems, Graphical User Interfaces

X Window System

The X Window System is a graphical windowing system that provides the foundation for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in Unix-like operating systems. It allows multiple applications to run concurrently and display their output in separate windows on a computer screen.

You will find this term commonly used in Operating Systems, Graphical User Interfaces

X.21

X.21 is a standard interface for connecting data terminal equipment (DTE) and data circuit-terminating equipment (DCE) in digital communication networks. It defines the physical and electrical characteristics of the interface, including connector pinouts and signaling protocols.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Data Communication

X.25

X.25 is a standard protocol suite for packet-switched networking that was widely used in the early days of computer networking. It provides connections between devices over public or private networks using virtual circuits.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Data Communication

X.400

X.400 is a standard protocol suite for email messaging and directory services in computer networks. It defines the format and procedures for exchanging messages between different email systems and managing directories of users and resources.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Email Systems

X.400 Address

An X.400 address is a unique identifier used to route email messages in X.400-based messaging systems. It consists of a series of components that specify the recipient's mailbox, organization, and country within the X.400 directory hierarchy.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Email Systems

X.509

X.509 is a standard format for public key certificates used in public key infrastructure (PKI) systems. It defines the structure and contents of digital certificates, including information about the certificate holder and the certificate authority that issued it.

You will find this term commonly used in Cybersecurity, Security, Networking

X.509 Certificate

An X.509 certificate is a digital document that verifies the identity of an entity, such as a website, server, or individual user, in a cryptographic manner. It contains information about the certificate holder, issuer, and public key, signed by a trusted certificate authority.

You will find this term commonly used in Cybersecurity, Security, Networking

XaaS (Anything as a Service)

XaaS refers to the delivery of various services over the internet, where the provider hosts and manages the infrastructure, software, and platform, allowing users to access them on-demand. Examples include SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

You will find this term commonly used in Cloud Computing, General IT

XaaS (Everything as a Service)

An emerging paradigm that extends the concept of providing various services over the internet beyond the traditional models.

You will find this term commonly used in Cloud Computing, Service Models

XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language)

XACML is an XML-based language for defining and enforcing access control policies in distributed systems. It provides a standardized framework for specifying who can access what resources under which conditions.

You will find this term commonly used in Security, Access Control

XAMPP

A free and open-source cross-platform web server solution stack package developed by Apache Friends, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MariaDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.

You will find this term commonly used in General IT

Xapian

An open-source search engine library, providing algorithms and data structures for indexing and searching text.

You will find this term commonly used in Software Development, Information Retrieval

XCAP (XML Configuration Access Protocol)

XCAP is a protocol for managing configuration data stored in XML format on a server. It provides mechanisms for accessing, modifying, and sharing configuration settings across different applications and devices in a networked environment.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Configuration Management

XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol)

A communication protocol that allows remote access to an X Window System desktop.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Remote Desktop Services

XDR (eXternal Data Representation)

XDR is a standard for serializing and deserializing data structures in a platform-independent manner. It defines a format for encoding data types and values for transmission between different computer systems.

You will find this term commonly used in Networking, Data Transmission

Xen Hypervisor

An open-source hypervisor that provides virtualization services for x86-compatible computers.

You will find this term commonly used in Virtualization

Xen Virtualization

Xen is an open-source hypervisor that enables multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single physical machine. It provides a virtualization platform for server consolidation, resource optimization, and improved scalability.

You will find this term commonly used in Virtualization, Cloud Computing

XENIX

Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system developed by Microsoft in the 1980s. It was designed for compatibility with the Unix System V release 2.0, providing a multi-user, multitasking environment for business and enterprise computing.

You will find this term commonly used in Operating Systems, Legacy Systems

Xenix OS

A version of the UNIX operating system, licensed by Microsoft and targeted at the business and educational markets.

You will find this term commonly used in Operating Systems, Legacy Systems

XER (eXternal Entity Resolution)

XER is a method for resolving external references in XML documents by associating them with specific resources or locations. It enables XML processors to retrieve and incorporate external entities into a document during parsing or validation.

You will find this term commonly used in Web Development, Data Integration

XForms

An XML format for the specification of a data processing model for web forms and their submission, aiming to improve web forms with rich functionality.

You will find this term commonly used in Web Development, Data Management

XFP (10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable)

XFP is a standard for high-speed optical transceivers used in 10 Gigabit Ethernet and other fiber-optic communication systems. It defines the physical and electrical characteristics of small form factor pluggable modules for transmitting and receiving data over optical fibers.