App

How to spell app

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce app

What does app mean?

1. nounA piece of software, especially one for a phone or tablet, designed to perform a specific task.

App in a sentence

• She booked the whole trip using a single travel app.

• The banking app lets you check your balance from anywhere.

Where does app come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a modern shortening of 'application', which itself descends from the Latin verb applicare, meaning 'to attach to' or 'to fold towards'. That verb was built from ad, meaning 'to' or 'towards', and plicare, meaning 'to fold', the same root that gives English words like 'pliable' and 'ply'. By the late twentieth century 'application' had taken on the computing sense of a software program written to do a particular task, and as personal computers and then smartphones spread, speakers clipped the long word down to the brisk single syllable 'app'. The form exploded into everyday use in the late 2000s when mobile phone shops opened, and 'app' was even named word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2010. Because it is a clipped form, the spelling simply keeps the opening of 'application', so the doubled p that sits inside that longer word survives at the end of the short one.

How the word is built

• clipping of application: applic- (from Latin applicare: to attach, apply)
• -ation (noun suffix), shortened to its first syllable