Dongle
loreA small piece of hardware you plug into a port to make something work: originally to prove you had paid for software, now usually to give a machine back a capability it shipped without.
The object is ordinary; the word has a history. Its earliest print appearance is in Byte, October 1981, in a passage about software piracy in the United Kingdom, and the account that survives scrutiny traces it to Wordcraft 80, a word processor for Commodore hardware. In a 1982 letter to Personal Computer World, Mike Lake recalled Graham Heggie of Analog Electronics of Coventry asking what they were going to call this dongle thingy, and the name stuck to the thing before anyone agreed what the name meant. The likeliest derivation is simply dangle, because it hung off the back of the machine, and that is still not settled. What is settled is the invented origin: in 1992 Rainbow Technologies ran an advertisement attributing the word to a person named Don Gall. There was no such inventor. The claim was a marketing joke, and it has been repeated as fact ever since.
The early ones were pass-through devices on a parallel or serial port, sitting between the computer and the printer so the port still worked; the software refused to run unless it could interrogate the thing. Modern protection dongles are secure cryptoprocessors that hold keys and execute instructions rather than merely answering a challenge, which is a different security argument: the secret never has to be present in the software at all.
Then the meaning inverted. A dongle used to be what a vendor made you carry so their software would run. It is now what you carry so your own hardware will run: the Bluetooth adapter on a laptop whose radio was left out, the USB-C to everything-else adapter, the streaming stick. Same shape, same port, opposite purpose. The complaint changed from paying for permission to paying for the ports you used to have.
The Don Gall story is worth keeping for its own sake. A vendor printed a fabricated etymology in a trade magazine as a joke, and the joke outran the correction by decades, which is roughly what happens to every confident origin story nobody checks.
Disputed / commonly mistold A popular version of this story is inaccurate - see the note above.
Also known as: dongles, hardware key, hardware lock, copy-protection dongle, USB dongle, dongle life
Sources
- Tedium, 19 October 2022, tracing the word to Wordcraft 80 on Commodore hardware and quoting Mike Lake's 1982 letter to Personal Computer World, in which Graham Heggie of Analog Electronics of Coventry asks "What are we going to call this dongle thingy?"; the piece dates the earliest print appearance to Byte, October 1981, in a passage about software piracy in the United Kingdom
- Wikipedia, software protection dongle: records Merriam-Webster's first known use of the word in 1981, and that a 1992 Rainbow Technologies advertisement attributing the name to a person called Don Gall was untrue and gave rise to an urban myth
- Wikipedia, dongle: the modern sense, the unresolved derivation from "dangle", and the linguist Ben Zimmer's finding that the Don Gall attribution was a tongue-in-cheek marketing invention