/ˈnɛtwɜːk/
[noun] A system of connected things, people, or organisations that work together or share information. In modern use, it also refers to a group of computers or devices that are linked so they can communicate with each other.
Before WiFi or railways, a 'network' was simply a piece of fabric with holes — a net made by work.
The word 'network' is deceptively simple in origin, built from two old English words that anyone can understand: 'net' and 'work'. The word 'net' comes from the Old English 'nett', meaning a mesh of knotted or woven cord, which itself descends from the Proto-Germanic root '*natjam', related to the idea of something knotted together. 'Work' comes from Old English 'weorc', meaning labour or something made by effort. Put them together, and you have the most literal of meanings: a piece of fabric or mesh created by the act of working with threads.
The earliest recorded uses of 'network' in English, appearing in the mid-sixteenth century around the 1560s, referred purely to this physical, textile sense — a structure of crossed threads or wires with regular open spaces between them, like the kind of mesh used in fishing nets or lace-making. It was a craftsman's term, grounded in the tangible world of looms and cord. The word described something you could hold in your hands, something with weight and texture.
The great leap in the word's life came during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when engineers and planners began applying the visual metaphor of a net — with its crossing lines and connected nodes — to large infrastructure systems. By the early nineteenth century, writers were describing road networks and canal networks, capturing how these systems branched and intersected just like threads in a mesh. The arrival of the railways made this metaphorical use almost unavoidable: a rail map looks exactly like a net spread across the land.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'network' had expanded further to describe systems of radio and telegraph stations that were linked together to share signals across great distances. American broadcasters adopted the word enthusiastically for groups of radio stations that shared programmes — the NBC and CBS 'networks' became household terms in the 1920s and 1930s. Here the metaphor was fully alive: information travelling along invisible lines from one node to another, just as a fish might travel through the spaces of a net.
The social sense of 'network' — meaning a group of people who know each other and share contacts or opportunities — emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and brought with it the verb 'to network', meaning to build and use such connections deliberately. This sense has become so dominant in modern professional life that many people encounter it before they ever think of physical nets. The digital age then gave 'network' yet another powerful meaning: a system of interconnected computers, culminating in the concept of the internet itself, which is essentially a network of networks — a net of nets, as its Latin-English name quietly suggests.
What is remarkable about 'network' is how honestly its original meaning predicted all its future uses. Whether you are talking about lace, railways, television, social contacts, or the internet, the core idea never changes: separate things, joined at crossing points, forming something greater than the sum of their parts. Few words have stretched so far while changing so little at heart.