If you have feedback about this definition or would like to suggest a new technical term, please contact us. If you cannot access a specific website but others load correctly, the server that hosts the website may be offline. For two systems to communicate over the internet, both must be online. To add online to a word list please sign up or log in.

“Online” has come to describe activities and concepts that take place on the Internet, such as online identity, online predator and online shop. We strive for accuracy and simplicity with every definition we publish. Our goal is to explain computer terminology in a way that is easy to understand.

• A device that is offline uses no external clock reference and relies upon its own internal clock.
• However, if the router isn’t hooked up to an active internet connection, you won’t be able to access the internet.
• Over 500,000 expert-authored dictionary and thesaurus entries
• Videos of the explosions ran continuously on television and online, and the efforts of the skeleton crew at the plant captured imaginations around the world.
• In this post, I will compare on-line vs online.

Related Terms

In this case, your device may be online in the context of the local network, but offline in terms of Internet access. The words on and line are directly connected in this compound, just like devices and the network when they are online. When many devices are connected to a sync master it is often convenient, if one wants to hear just the output of one single device, to take it offline because, if the device is played back online, all synchronized devices have to locate the playback point and wait for each other device to be in synchronization. A device can appear online within a local network, but still not have internet access.

Explore a world of game categories

This chart isn’t completely exhaustive—it only looks at books published in English since 1800, but it is still good for illustrating a long-term usage trend. The chart below, which graphs online vs. on-line over time, illustrates this trend. On-line was originally more popular, but online has since surpassed it in total usage. It’s slightly newer, although both versions originated in the late 20th century with the advent of widespread personal computing.

In the context of file systems, online and offline are synonymous with mounted and not mounted. With the growing communication tools and media, the words offline and online are used very frequently. In Internet Explorer version 6, the level of direct and indirect links, the maximum amount of local disc space allowed to be consumed, and the schedule on which local copies are checked to see whether they are up-to-date, are configurable for each individual new sweepstakes casinos Favourites entry.

When a device is “online,” it is powered on and connected to a network, other devices, or the internet. Slater asserts that there are legal and regulatory pressures to reduce the distinction between online and offline, with a “general tendency to assimilate online to offline and erase the distinction,” stressing, however, that this does not mean that online relationships are being reduced to pre-existing offline relationships. This distinction between online and offline is sometimes inverted, with online concepts being used to define and to explain offline activities, rather than (as per the conventions of the desktop metaphor with its desktops, trash cans, folders, and so forth) the other way around. To support his argument that the distinctions in relationships are more complex than a simple dichotomy of online versus offline, he observes that some people draw no distinction between an online relationship, such as indulging in cybersex, and an offline relationship, such as being pen pals. The distinction between online and offline is conventionally seen as the distinction between computer-mediated communication and face-to-face communication (e.g., face time), respectively.

For example, in file systems’ resizing capabilities, online grow and online shrink respectively mean the ability to increase or decrease the space allocated to that file system without needing to unmount it.citation needed When pages are added to the Favourites list, they can be marked to be “available for offline browsing”. During the 19th century, the term on line was commonly used in both the railroad and telegraph industries. A similar meaning is also given by the prefixes cyber and e, as in words cyberspace, cybercrime, email, and e-commerce.