WAP, dongle, and cookie are some of the least understood words by the public, according to a survey. The Gadget Helpline surveyed more than 5,000 users and came up with a Top 10 list of technology-related words people find most confusing.

The firm says companies should use language people understand, rather than resorting to jargon. The move is backed by the Plain English Campaign, saying it would help bring down the "walls of techno-babble". Peter Griffiths, campaign secretary for the Plain English Campaign said that there were ways to make things easy for users to understand.
"We need to pull our head out of the digital clouds and use plain English," he said. "If changing the name isn't an option then a glossary of terms would work. Not only does it explain the language, but it's a nice way of learning for people who don't have such a good grasp of the language."
Many of the words, such as Digital TV, have entered the English language but not everyone knows what they mean.
On top of that, many firms have different names for identical products, which complicates things further.
Alex Watson, editor of Custom PC magazine, reported that companies were under pressure to come up with new names and some of those would eventually wind up in our lexicon.

"Some names are just made up for marketing purposes, while others are chosen so users can relate to the term. One way of linking peripherals to a Mac was via an interface called FireWire. On a Sony it is called i.LINK and it's also called Lynx by Texas Instruments, even though all three are exactly the same thing. That hardly makes things easy for the consumer.
Even when the industry tries to appeal to regular people, it doesn't always work. Take Wi-Fi - it was named solely because of HiFi. Wireless fidelity doesn't actually mean anything, but the alternative was 802.11B which hardly trips off the tongue."
Mr Watson said that language frequently evolved in such a way as the term would make more sense.
"It may be called Wi-Fi but most people would call it a wireless network, which is exactly what it is," he said.
So here are those top ten confusing terms explained:
Dongle: A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a computer, and may be portable like a USB Pen. Although earlier use of dongles was to authenticate a piece of software, the word dongle is now widely used to refer to a broadband wireless adaptor or any small USB device.

Cookie: HTTP cookies (also referred to as tracking cookies, or simply cookies) are small pieces of text, stored on a user's computer by a web browser; and they contain the user's settings, shopping cart contents, or other data used by websites. Cookies are subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs that run on the browsing computer. In fact, cookies are simple pieces of data that affect the operation of a web server, not the client, and do so in very specific ways. In particular, they are neither spyware nor viruses, although cookies from certain sites are described as spyware by many anti-spyware products because they allow users to be tracked when they visit various sites.

WAP: Wireless Application Protocol is an open international standard for network communications in a wireless communication environment. Its main use is to enable access to the Internet (HTTP) from a mobile phone or PDA. A WAP browser provides all of the basic services of a computer based web browser but simplified to operate within the restrictions of a mobile phone, such as its smaller view screen. WAP sites are websites written in, or dynamically converted to, WML (Wireless Markup Language) and accessed via the WAP browser. Phone Jack: A telephone plug is a type of male connector used to connect a telephone to the telephone wiring in a home