Origins
The word 'network' is a native English compound whose journey from textile craft to digital infrastructure spans nearly five centuries. First attested around 1556, it originally meant 'work made in the form of a net' — a piece of fabric with threads knotted into a mesh pattern. The word is a straightforward compound of two Old English elements: 'net' and 'work.'
'Net' derives from Old English 'nett' (a mesh, a snare, a knitted or knotted fabric), from Proto-Germanic *natją, from PIE *ned- (to knot, to bind, to twist together). This is one of the oldest material-culture words in the Indo-European family: nets for fishing, trapping, and carrying are among the most ancient human technologies. The PIE root *ned- also produced Latin 'nodus' (knot), which gave English 'node' (a point of connection) and 'nodule'; Latin 'nectere' (to bind, to tie), which gave English 'connect' (to bind together), 'annex' (to bind to), and 'nexus' (a connection, a binding point); and possibly English 'knot' itself through a separate Germanic line.
'Work' derives from Old English 'weorc' (something made, labor, a deed, a structure), from Proto-Germanic *werką, from PIE *wérǵom (work). This root produced Greek 'ergon' (work), which appears in 'energy' (activity, from 'en-' + 'ergon'), 'organ' (a working instrument), and 'surgery' (hand-work, from 'kheir' + 'ergon'). Through Germanic, the same root gave English 'wrought' (worked, fashioned) and 'wright' (a maker, a worker, as in 'playwright' and 'wheelwright').
Word Formation
The compound 'network' was initially a concrete, material term: lace, embroidery, and woven mesh were all described as 'network.' Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word gradually extended to any arrangement of intersecting lines or channels — rivers forming a network across a landscape, roads forming a network across a country. This geographic and topological sense was well established by the early nineteenth century.
The critical metaphorical leap came in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when 'network' was applied to interconnected systems of human communication and transportation: a network of railways, a network of telegraph wires, a network of broadcasting stations. The NBC, CBS, and ABC broadcasting networks, established in the 1920s-1940s, cemented 'network' in its modern sense of 'an interconnected group of stations or nodes sharing content.'
The computing sense — a network of interconnected computers sharing data — emerged in the 1960s with ARPANET and its successors. This sense drew equally on the broadcasting metaphor (stations sharing content) and the older topological metaphor (nodes connected by lines). The compound 'internet' (a network of networks, coined 1974) built directly on this foundation, and today 'network' in the computing sense is arguably the word's most common usage.
Latin Roots
German 'Netzwerk' and Dutch 'netwerk' are calques (loan-translations) of the English compound, using their native equivalents of 'net' and 'work.' French uses 'réseau' (from Latin 'rēte,' net), a different word but the same underlying mesh metaphor.