Podcast Etymology
Podcast Etymology
The word “podcast” was invented by Ben Hammersley, a British technology writer for The Guardian newspaper, in a February 2004 article.
The Coinage
Hammersley coined the term as a blend of “iPod” and “broadcast” to describe the emerging audio blogging phenomenon, which allowed users to download internet radio shows to their devices like Apple’s iPod.
First Usage
The first ever usage of the term appeared in Hammersley’s article:
“But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?”
This appeared in an article titled “Audible revolution” published on February 12, 2004, which explored the emerging trend of downloadable radio programming enabled by MP3 players, cheap audio software, and weblogs.
The Story Behind the Coinage
According to Ben Hammersley’s own account (from a YouTube video), the word was created almost by accident. Here is his exact transcript:
I’m Ben Hamsley and I do many things, but mostly I’m the person who invented the word podcast. I’m very sorry. I can tell you the story. This was in 2004, and I was a writer for the for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. And at the time the newspaper was paper centric which meant that all of the deadlines were for the print presses to run. And I’d written this article about this sort of emerging idea of downloadable uh audio content that was automatically downloaded because of an RSS feed. I submitted the article on time. But then I got a phone call from my editor about 15 minutes before the presses were due to roll saying, “Hey, um, that piece is about a sentence short for the shape of the page. We don’t have time to, you know, move the page around. Can you just write us another sentence?” And so I just made up a sentence which says something like, “But what do we call this phenomenon?” And then I made up some silly words. It went out. It went into the article. didn’t think any more of it. And then about six months later or so, I got an email from the Oxford American Dictionary saying, “Hey, where did you get that word from that was in the article you wrote? It seems to be the first citation of the word podcast.” Now, here we are almost 20 years later and it became part of the discourse.
Context
The article described how:
- MP3 players (like Apple’s iPod) were becoming widespread
- Audio production software was becoming cheap or free
- Weblogging was an established part of the internet
- These factors combined to create a “new boom in amateur radio”
The term “podcasting” was one of several options Hammersley considered, alongside “audioblogging” and “GuerillaMedia”, but it was “podcasting” that stuck and became the standard term.