Why Do We Call It a “Bug”?

You’ve heard them term thousands of times. Dealing with a frozen screen, glitchy app., or software that just won’t do what it's supposed to. And blamed it on a “bug.” But why do we call it that?

The term “computer bug” has a quite literal word origin. In 1947, engineers at Harvard University were working on the Mark II, an early electromechanical computer. One day, the machine stopped working. After some tinkering around, the engineers discovered the problem. A moth had gotten trapped in one of the computer’s relays.

They carefully removed the insect, taped it into their lab logbook, and wrote, “First actual case of bug being found.” The log is now part of computing folklore, and the moth itself is preserved in the Smithsonian!

While the word “bug” started being used informally by engineers for decades to describe mechanical glitches, this moment helped popularize its use in the world of computing. By the 1950s, “debugging” a system became common technical slang and eventually became a permanent part of tech lingo.

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