Here’s What USB Really Stands For

Did you know that Wi-Fi kind of means nothing?

I’d always assumed that because hi-fi stands for high fidelity, Wi-Fi was short for wireless fidelity. Nope: Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance who led its name selection, said that “Wi-Fi doesn’t stand for anything. It is not an acronym. There is no meaning.”

Huh. So what about USB, the connection ports used for everything from chargers to keyboards and printers?

Unlike Wi-Fi, USB is actually short for something: Universal Serial Bus. Its first known use was in 1995.

Until 1996, computers had “one or two serial ports, a parallel port, mouse and keyboard ports, and, in some cases, a joystick port,” Britannica said.

USBs solved that problem, providing a standard way to transfer information faster between devices.

But, like me, you’re wondering what buses have to do with the port, let’s break down each word:

• Universal – that means it fits a range of devices, as we just mentioned. It’s “built to a universally accepted standard,” so all USB products have to follow exact specifications, Erik Gross, co-founder of The Tech Academy, explained on YouTube.
• Bus – you’ll see why I put this before “serial” in a minute. In tech, a “bus” transmits information within a computer and/or over short distances (which allows, for example, a USB mouse to work); it’s usually a wire or collection of wires.
• Serial – During this transfer, Gross said, you can “either send the pieces data along one wire”, which happens when bits of information drip through the channel, one after the other. Or, you can spread that information across many wires, which each carry pieces of information in the order of the entire transmission, not one-by-one. A serial transfer therefore travels down one wire “one bit at a time in a sequential fashion,” reads What Every Engineer Should Know About Data Communications. The other type, with multiple wires, is called “parallel” transmission.

Therefore, a universal serial bus (USB) is a standard port that transmits information to or from your computer to or from another device, and which only requires a single wire to do so.

For something “universal”, there are a few types of physical USB connections: USB-A, USB-B, USB-C, Micro-USB, and Mini-USBs.

USB-C is the type you might use for your charger. They’ve become more popular than the larger USB-As (the rectangular computer one that only works when you put the port in the right way).

Wired suggests this is partly because they’re smaller and can be more powerful than USB-A because of how their hardware works. They also can’t be plugged in “upside down”; their design is reversible.

Still, USB-C (and all other USB types) are standardised according to their category and (of course) transfer information across a single wire. So, they qualify.