Keyword: appz

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APPZ: The word warez is intended as a plural of ware, short for computer software. Thus it is intended to be pronounced like the word wares, as in the English pronunciation of Juárez.

One possible origin  of the word warez is from ware, meaning any kind of product of human labor (from whence, or course, "software"), and, especially in its plural form, goods offered for sale. Before the Internet was available, users of dial-up bulletin board systems coined the term to indicate more than one piece of software. "Software" is a non-count noun, so it was natural to use a count noun to differentiate between one "ware" (one piece of software) and multiple "wares" or, more humorously, "warez" (multiple pieces of software).[citation needed] Due to the relatively large amounts of time needed to transfer large files over slow telephone modems and bulletin board systems (BBSes), software exchangers would typically ask for one-for-one trades from their colleagues (sometimes file for file, but more typically byte for byte). While the 'cost' of each byte transfer might have been equal, or 1:1, the desireability of the software (quality, origin, legality, rarity, privacy) was not, prompting exchangers to first request to see what warez were available on a particular server before submitting their own 'prized warez', especially on a typical premium server with a 3:1 or 10:1 transfer ratio. Hence, software exchangers adopted a merchant-like attitude with their software collection(s) and the term "warez" became apt. The somewhat dated flavor of the word "wares" is said to have led to the use of much humorously intended mock-medieval phraseology amongst software traders, such as, "Excuse me, kind sir. May I see your warez?"

It's also possible[original research?] that 'warez' was derived by an example of folk etymology, where multiple software was incorrectly referred to as 'softwares', and a simple abbreviation of that gives wares. During the bulletin board era, there was a proliferation of terms used to describe broad classes of software, derived from the word 'software' itself, (freeware, shareware, postcardware, donateware, malware, annoyware), these became collectively referred to as "wares", meaning something more akin to 'classes of software' rather than 'multiple pieces of software'.

The fact is[original research?], each proposed etymology above is a postulation, and therefore an example of false etymology, as there is no documentation available at this time that clearly describes how the word use actually arose.

In either case, the transition from 'wares' to 'warez' is more clear. It was common at that time,[original research?] for reasons that may have been purely cultural in the emerging unencrypted relay mail network, or may have been deliberate in order to evade detection by BBS text filters, for BBSers to swap letters and numbers and symbols into words, such as replacing 'E' with '3', 'l' with '1', 'o' with '0' (zero), or 'S' with 'Z' or '$' (see leetspeek). Hence "warez", and thus: wares -> hardware (1515) -> computer hardware (1947) -> software/hardware (1960) -> shareware/donateware/freeware/etc -> 'wares -> wares -> warez or war3z.

Warez is used most commonly as a noun: "My neighbour downloaded 10 gigabytes of warez yesterday"; or as an adjective "Do you know any good warez sites?"; but has also been used as a verb: "The new Windows was warezed a month before the company officially released it". The collection of warez groups is referred to globally as the "warez scene" or more ambiguously "The Scene".

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