"The Web" at 20 - Ben Zimmer, Visual Thesaurus

Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau authored the proposal that launched "the World Wide Web," and the English language has never been the same. In my On Language column for The New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I take a look back at the inception of "the Web" and its many linguistic offspring over the years. As a master metaphor for our online age, the gossamer Web has proved remarkably resilient. As I mention in the column, the phrase "world-wide web" (with world-wide properly hyphenated) was not original to Berners-Lee and Cailliau, used in the past to refer to spy rings or other complex global networks.

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