Bandwidth: How much data a device can send and receive. People measure this with the rate of bits sent per second, which people call a bitrate. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

Binary: A number system that uses 1s and 0s to represent data in a computer. 01001001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100100 00101101 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01100111 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100001 01101100 00101110

Data center: A large facility with many servers on a network that companies and organizations use to manage, store, and send lots of data.

DNS: Domain Name System, a hierarchy of servers that matches the domain names people understand and use to the IP addresses that other computers know them by.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, which is a language used to construct and format web pages with text, pictures, and all kinds of other cool gizmos.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is a protocol that runs over TCP/IP to manage the movement of information around the World Wide Web.

Internet: A global system of connected computers that allows you to share information using wires and.

IP address: The unique number that refers to a computer’s location on a network. It's like a street address for the postal service except…in binary.

ISP: Internet Service Provider, a specific company or organization that provides internet access, typically to paying customers. Just don't confuse it with your school's International Studies Program and you should be good.

LAN: Short for a Local Area Network, this is a smaller, self-contained network of computers directly connected to a central hub. If the internet was a fridge, this would be the mini-fridge your cool friend uses to keep cold drinks in the basement as you stage a LOL campaign.

Modem: A device that feeds the internet connection from an Internet Service Provider into a computer and router. This is the one that translates between electrical signals and Wi-Fi to make sure the source can talk to the destination.

Packets: The chunks computers break information into so that they can be sent over the internet quickly.

Protocol: An established set of rules that allow computers to send data to one another.

Router: A computer that directs packets through a network and figures out the best paths for information to travel.

Server: A computer on a network that other computers use to get information and complete requests.

TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the major protocols responsible for getting packets of data between computers. IP moves packets to their intended destination and TCP makes sure all packets get to that destination so that it can stitch them back together.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator, the character-based address of a particular file on the internet. URLs contain a protocol, domain name, and a path to a given file. Take "https://twitter.com/shmoop," for example. "Https" is the protocol to access the page, "twitter.com" is the domain name, and "/shmoop" points to a file that shows Shmoop’s Twitter feed. These aren't for the computer so much as they are for us to be able to remember the names of websites.

World Wide Web: Never, ever call this the same thing as the internet. This one's a model for looking at and linking to information by using the internet. Its crowning achievement? The HTML page.

Wi-Fi: Wireless technology that uses radio waves to send information from computers over the internet.