Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
| Domain | Definition |
Computing | AOL! n. [Usenet] Common synonym for "Me, too!" alluding to the legendary propensity of America Online users to utter contentless "Me, too!" postings. The number of exclamation points following varies from zero to five or so. The pseudo-HTML Me, too! is also frequently seen. See also September that never ended. Source: Jargon File. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
AOL is an initialism for America Online, a corporate ISP. The ISP is owned by Time Warner, which uses the NYSE stock symbol "TWX". America Online is perhaps best known for "AOL Instant Messenger" (AIM) [1], a free "instant messaging" computer program. Today AOL's main competitor is Microsoft's MSN.
AOL got its start as a short-lived venture called Control Video, a company whose product was an online service called Gameline for the Atari 2600 video game console. Subscribers bought a modem from the company for $49.95 and paid a one-time $15 setup fee. Gameline permitted subscribers to temporarily download games and keep track of high scores, at a cost of approximately $1 an hour.
In 1983 the company nearly went bankrupt, and a video game specialist named Steve Case ascended to the position of CEO.
Case changed the company's strategy, and in 1985 launched a sort of mega-BBS for Commodore 64 and 128 computers, originally called Quantum Link ("Q-Link" for short). He also changed the name of the company to Quantum Computer Services. In October 1989, Quantum launched its AOL service for Apple II and Macintosh computers, and in February 1991 AOL for MS-DOS was opened. In October 1991, Quantum changed its name to America Online. These changes began a trend of tremendous growth in the number of pay-based BBS services, like Prodigy and CompuServe, with whom AOL was competing.
In the early 1990s, AOL was among the first service providers to give customers from outside academia and the military access to the Internet. They also emphasized a relatively user-friendly, graphics-heavy interface. As such, they were primarily associated with the influx of new users, unversed in netiquette, who came online in that period. In some quarters, such as Usenet, their name remains synonymous with impolite and ignorant new users.
AOL has long maintained a massive marketing push, mailing sign-up diskettes and CD-ROMs to over 100 million households, which fueled a massive growth and helped them dominate the online field. As a reaction of this, in August 2001 the campaign No more AOL CDs was started. Their goal is to collect one million unwanted CDs and give them back by a huge armada of trucks.
In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, AOL began purchasing and supporting many popular software projects and companies. These purchases included CompuServe; Nullsoft's Winamp, purchased in 1999 for $8686 million; Netscape; Mozilla (now an independent organization); and ICQ. Some of these projects are open source.
In 2000, AOL merged with Time Warner. See Time Warner for more information.
Notable Persons Associated With AOL
External links
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "AOL."
| The following table is compiled from various sources, across various languages. When English abbreviations or acronyms come from a non-English source, this is noted. | |||
| Entry | Source | Expression | Field |
AOL | English | Acroosteolysis | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |||
Crosswords: AOL |
| Specialty definitions using "AOL": America On-Line, Inc., AOL! ♦ bottom feeder ♦ CompuServe Information Service, cyberbunny ♦ mouse arrest ♦ Terms Of Service, The Network. (references) |
| Non-English Usage: "AOL" is also a word in the following language with the English translation in parentheses. Scottish (lime). |
| Domain | Usage | |
Movie/TV Titles | ||
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title | ||
References | |||
Books | |||
High Tech |
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Consumer Goods | |||
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Business | The three biggest German Internet service providers (ISPs) are DTAG (T-Online), AOL Bertelsmann AG, and CompuServe Deutschland. (references) | |
At the end of 1999, T-Online was the market leader with 4.2 million subscribers, AOL was in second place with 1.4 million subscribers. (references) | ||
Among the big three, AOL experienced the largest growth in subscription in 1999, 70% as compared to 37% for T-Online and less than 1% for Compuserve. (references) | ||
Economic History | Israel | Microsoft, Pratt and Whitney, AOL Time Warner, Intel, IBM, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Kimberly Clark, 3M, GE, Lucent, 3Com, Hewlett Packard, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Sun Microsystems. (references) |
Brazil | Besides being the largest ISP, UOL is also the largest Brazilian portal and has attracted many business partners with its e-commerce site "Shopping UOL." Other ISPs include ZAZ/ Terra (owned by Spain's Telefonica), iG, AOL, Starmedia, O Site, Matrix, PSI Net, etc. (references) | |
Travel | Vietnam | There are also no dial-up numbers for international Internet Service Providers (AT&T, AOL, CompuServe, etc.). Internet services can be accessed through hotel business centers or from a growing number of Internet cafes. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| "AOL" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 95.83% of the time. "AOL" is used about 24 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 95.83% | 23 | 72,767 |
| Lexical Verb (base form) | 4.17% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 24 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| Country | Name |
| USA | AOL Time Warner, Inc. |
| (more examples...) |
Source: compiled by the editor from Icon Group International, Inc.
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day | Expression | Frequency per Day |
aol | 200,121 | love at aol | 1,346 |
aol mail | 43,391 | aol mail.com | 1,296 |
aol instant messenger | 28,912 | aol home page | 1,195 |
aol anywhere | 20,734 | aol broadband | 1,112 |
aol netmail | 14,365 | aol aim | 990 |
aol email | 4,251 | aol customer service | 907 |
aol quick buddy | 3,277 | aol instant messenger download | 864 |
aol messenger | 2,979 | aol download | 845 |
aol hometown | 2,536 | aol chat rooms | 778 |
aol search | 2,427 | aol.com welcome | 751 |
aol buddy icon | 2,403 | aol billing | 746 |
aol chat | 2,333 | aol travel | 689 |
aol im | 2,241 | aol e mail | 682 |
aol com | 2,097 | aol time warner | 634 |
aol icon | 1,934 | anywhere aol mail | 611 |
check aol mail | 1,871 | aol.com mail | 575 |
aol profile | 1,454 | anywhere aol.com | 536 |
aol express | 1,437 | aol horoscope | 525 |
aol 8.0 | 1,374 | aol password | 523 |
aol game | 1,366 | aim aol express | 488 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
Derivations | |
Words ending with "AOL": gaol. (additional references) | |
Words containing "AOL": gaoled, gaoler, gaolers, gaoling, gaols, haole, haoles, kaoliang, kaoliangs, kaolin, kaoline, kaolines, kaolinic, kaolinite, kaolinites, kaolinitic, kaolins. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-l-o" | |
-1 letter: al, la, lo. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-l-o" | |
+1 letter: aloe, alow, also, alto, awol, bola, calo, coal, cola, foal, gaol, goal, halo, kola, load, loaf, loam, loan, loca, lota, mola, olea, olla, opal, oral, oval, sola, tola. | |
+2 letters: aboil, acold, afoul, aglow, ahold, aioli, alamo, aldol, algor, allod, allot, allow, alloy, aloes, aloft, aloha, aloin, alone, along, aloof, aloud, altho, altos, amole, anole, argol, atoll, awols, azlon, azole, bloat, bolar, bolas, boral, boyla, calos, carol, claro, cloak, coala, coals, coaly, colas, colza, comal, copal, coral, coxal, dobla, dolma, domal, dotal, float, flora, flota, foals, focal, folia, galop, gaols, gloam, gloat, goals, goral, hallo, halos, haole, holla, horal, jalop, joual, koala, kolas, labor, laevo, largo, lasso, llano, loach, loads, loafs, loams, loamy, loans, loath, lobar, local, logan, logia, loofa, loral, loran, lotah, lotas, lovat, loyal, modal, molal, molar, molas, moola, moral, nodal, nopal, notal, octal, offal, ollas, opals, orals, ovals, parol, polar, polka, royal, salol, salon, salvo, shoal, skoal, solan, solar, talon, tolan, tolar, tolas, tonal, total, valor, viola, vocal, voila, volar, volta, volva, waldo, woald, zoeal, zonal. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)41 4F 4C |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
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| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
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| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
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Morse Code (1836) (references).- --- .-.. |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000001 01001111 01001100 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)A O L |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0041 004F 004C |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
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Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)354946 |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Modern 4. Usage: Commercial | 5. Quotations: Non-fiction 6. Usage Frequency 7. Names: Company Usage 8. Expressions: Internet | 9. Abbreviations 10. Acronyms 11. Derivations 12. Anagrams | 13. Orthography 14. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
