WAIS: (Wide Area Information Servers) - A commercial software package that allows the indexing of huge quantities of information, then makes those indices searchable across networks and the Internet. A prominent feature of WAIS is the ranking (scoring) of the search results, according to how relevant the hits are. See Also: Search Engine

WAN: (Wide Area Network) - Any internet or network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus.

WAV: (Waveform Audio) - A common audio file format for DOS and Windows computers (.wav).

WINSOCK: A Microsoft Windows DLL file that provides the interface to TCP/IP services and allows Windows to use web browsers, FTP programs, and other Internet-related programs.

WWW: (World Wide Web) - The technical definition of the WWW is the global network of hypertext (HTTP) servers that allow text, graphics, audio and video files to be mixed together. The second, more loosely used definition is the entire range of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS, and other such tools.