The Cloud
Etymology
The name comes from old network diagrams, where engineers drew the messy, unknowable expanse of a telephone or data network as a simple cloud shape — a symbol for "somewhere out there, don’t worry about the internals." The marketing phrase "the cloud" hardened around 2006. The cloud is really just data centers: physical warehouses of machines you never see.
noun · /THUH KLOWD/
Storing and running things on someone else’s internet-connected computers instead of your own device.
What it names
The shift from owning hardware to renting it invisibly — the reason your photos survive a dropped phone and software updates itself overnight.
Example
She stopped emailing files to herself once everything lived in the cloud.
Related idea
The cloud reframes a server from something you buy to something you rent by the minute — convenient, but it also means your data sits on infrastructure you don’t control.