Cybersecurity

How to spell cybersecurity

13 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce cybersecurity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cybersecurity mean?

1. nounThe practice of protecting computers, networks, and data from digital attack or unauthorised access.

Cybersecurity in a sentence

• The bank invested heavily in cybersecurity after the data breach.

• Her degree focused on cybersecurity and network defence.

Where does cybersecurity come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern compound that fuses two very different ancestries. The first part, 'cyber-', traces back to the Greek kybernetes, meaning 'steersman' or 'helmsman', the person who governs a ship; the mathematician Norbert Wiener revived it in the 1940s when he coined 'cybernetics' for the study of control and communication systems. From there 'cyber-' broke loose as a prefix for anything involving computers and networks. The second part comes from the Latin securus, meaning 'free from care', built from se- 'without' and cura 'care', which gave English 'secure' and 'security'. The two halves were welded together in the late twentieth century as digital networks spread, and the term became commonplace in the 1990s and 2000s. The spelling trap is purely in the second half, where the unstressed vowels in 'secur-ity' invite errors, while 'cyber' itself is written exactly as it sounds.

How the word is built

• cyber- (relating to computers/networks, from cybernetics)
• secur- (safe, from Latin securus)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)