You know it as the annoying obstacle to getting in to the website of your choice. The mix of distorted letters and figures that a computer cannot read and which you need to type in so as to get access. Unfortunately you cannot read it either!
This annoying phenomenon is in fact an almost impossible acronym. Captcha is actually the initial letters of Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It results from work done to design tests which humans should be able to pass, but computers not. In 2000, key minds working on generating such a test included Venezuelan-born Manuel Blum and Guatemalan-born Luis von Ahn. The latter is now only 35 and sold reCAPTCHA, the company he founded, to Google 5 years ago. According to Google, some 200 million captchas are solved by users every day. This means that some 150,000 hours a day are spent entering the right combinations.
The word enters the English in 2000. But it did not really go mainstream until about 5 years later. According to Google search information, it became a relatively common word only around 2006 and as a search word term peaked in 2012. Perhaps this indicates that there will be alternative access systems to the computer in the future. Many hope this will be the case.
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