All The Wares

What Does All The Wares Mean?

The phrase “all the wares,” though obscure and sparsely documented, is something that is used in today’s IT slang. It is an evolution of the term “wares” to describe different kinds of software. “All the wares” refers to a wide spectrum of software products with collective access.

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Techopedia Explains All The Wares

As the world of software engineering has grown over the past few decades, the term “wares” was used in many ways to talk about different types of software. For instance, free software was known as “freeware,” and poorly engineered software was called by many different nicknames with the suffix “ware” such as crapware or dumpware.

At the same time, the emergence of “Internet speech” and related social slang led to the use of phrases like “all the feels” to describe a wide range of emotions. Intuitively, “all the wares” became common as a way to talk about a diverse collection of software items. In some cases, the term “wares” is intentionally misspelled with a “z,” which often indicates that the wares referenced are illegally obtained. For example, someone might say – “he has all the warez in his network.” This would imply that the person who is mentioned has an impressive collection of illegally downloaded software.

“All the wares” can also refer to all types of intrusive software such as malware, spyware and adware.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…