Cyber

How to spell cyber

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cyber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cyber mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to computers, networks, or the internet, especially in matters of security and crime.

Cyber in a sentence

• The company hired a new cyber security team after the breach.

• Police warned that cyber crime had risen sharply over the year.

Where does cyber come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a clipping of cybernetics, a term coined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener for the study of control and communication in animals and machines. He built it on the Ancient Greek kybernetes, which literally meant a steersman or the helmsman who governs a ship, from the verb kybernan, to steer or to guide. The same Greek root also gave us govern and governor, through Latin gubernare, so the modern sense of controlling systems is no accident. From the 1980s onwards writers chopped cybernetics down to the prefix cyber-, which attached to a flood of new computing terms such as cyberspace, cybercafe, and cybersecurity. By the 1990s cyber had broken free as an adjective in its own right, meaning anything to do with computers and the internet, and the unusual y in the second position is the spelling trap that survives from its Greek beginnings.

How the word is built

• cyber- (combining form from cybernetics, ultimately Greek kybernetes: steersman, governor)