Origins
The word 'blog' has an unusually precise and well-documented birth.βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ Unlike most English words, whose origins are debated and approximate, 'blog' can be traced to specific people, specific dates, and even a specific sidebar on a specific website.
The parent word, 'weblog,' was coined on December 17, 1997, by Jorn Barger, who used it to describe his site Robot Wisdom β a curated list of interesting links with brief commentary. The compound is transparent: 'web' (the World Wide Web, itself a metaphor from Old English 'webb,' a woven fabric, because the internet is a web of interconnected pages) plus 'log' (a chronological record). The word 'log' in this sense derives from the nautical practice of measuring a ship's speed by dropping a wooden log tied to a knotted rope overboard and counting how many knots paid out in a set time β the results were recorded in the 'log book,' which eventually shortened to 'log' for any chronological record.
The clipping happened in early 1999. Peter Merholz, a web designer in San Francisco, announced in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com: 'I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as "wee-blog." Or "blog" for short.' He later described this as a throwaway joke β he liked the way the word sounded. But the internet seized on it. Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs, adopted 'blog' as both a noun and a verb, and in August 1999 launched Blogger, the platform that would democratize the medium. Google acquired Blogger in 2003.
Development
The speed of the word's adoption was extraordinary. By 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary added 'blog.' In 2004, Merriam-Webster named it their Word of the Year. The word spawned an entire family: 'blogger' (one who blogs), 'blogosphere' (the collective world of blogs), 'blogging' (the activity), 'vlog' (video blog, by analogy), 'microblog' (short-form blogging, as on Twitter), and 'liveblog' (real-time event coverage).
Linguistically, 'blog' is a textbook example of clipping β the same process that gave English 'bus' (from 'omnibus'), 'phone' (from 'telephone'), 'flu' (from 'influenza'), and 'pub' (from 'public house'). What makes 'blog' unusual is that the clipping happened at a morpheme boundary in a way that obscured the original compound: 'weblog' clearly means 'web + log,' but 'blog' on its own is opaque. This opacity actually aided adoption β freed from its transparent compound meaning, 'blog' could become a versatile, all-purpose word.
The underlying roots are ancient even if the word is not. 'Web' traces to Old English 'webb' and Proto-Germanic *wabjan, meaning to weave. 'Log' appears in Middle English as 'logge,' a bulky piece of timber, possibly from Old Norse. The nautical sense β and from it the record-keeping sense β developed in the sixteenth century. That a word combining these two old roots could be coined in 1997, clipped as a joke in 1999, and become a global standard by 2004 is a sign of how quickly language can move when the internet is the medium.