‘To Walpha’ – a new verb for searching?

May 18th, 2009 | Categories: Wolfram Alpha | Tags:

I was geeking out majorly yesterday while watching the new Star Trek movie with some friends and we got around to discussing Wolfram Alpha a fair bit (well, I was doing most of the talking to be honest – I’d had a LOT of coffee).

As I was explaining what it could and couldn’t do – I found myself saying ‘if you search for XYZ on Wolfram Alpha then..’ a lot and it quickly got old as it was nowhere near as succinct as ‘if you google XY then…”.  It wasn’t long before I found myself saying ‘If you Walpha XYZ then…’ and no one pulled me up on it.  Rather than saying ‘What the hell are you talking about…there is no such word as Walpha.’ – my friends uncounciously started using the term themselves.

Wonder if it will catch on?

  1. MJC
    May 18th, 2009 at 18:25
    Reply | Quote | #1

    walpha. Is that like wasscally wabbit?

  2. MJC
    May 18th, 2009 at 18:25
    Reply | Quote | #2

    P.s. the wolfa alpha is getting noticed in the economics field a little.

  3. Jennifer
    May 18th, 2009 at 21:43
    Reply | Quote | #3

    This new word has been a topic of discussion here since I found it on your site. You may have coined a term there … although it isn’t quite as easy to say as “google”, “walpha” may indeed catch on as a verb.

  4. Mike Croucher
    May 18th, 2009 at 21:45
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Hi Jennifer

    Good to hear from you. Where is ‘here’? :)

  5. October 16th, 2009 at 20:46
    Reply | Quote | #5

    WolframAlpha (www.Wolfa.com) has launched, thankfully! I was getting tired of typing the long name daily.

  6. October 30th, 2009 at 11:49
    Reply | Quote | #6

    FYI, http://www.wolfa.com is a FAKE domain and is not affiliated with Wolfram Research. We do not know for what purpose yet, but I highly recommend that people use the real url http://wolframalpha.com