The web and the internet are not the same thing
People use the two words interchangeably, and they are not interchangeable. The internet is the wiring — a NETWORK of networks, millions of machines agreeing to pass messages along for each other, running since the 1970s. The web is one thing built on top of that wiring, and it is much younger: Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN in 1989, and the first WEBSITE went live in 1991. It explained what a website was, which was a reasonable thing to lead with at the time.
So a BROWSER, a WEBPAGE and every LINK you follow belong to the web. EMAIL, STREAMING and the machines quietly syncing your photos are using the internet without touching the web at all. Both sets of words are in this grid.
It travels by cable, not by sky
Almost everyone assumes international traffic goes up to satellites. It does not. Around 99% of it runs through fibre-optic cables lying on the seabed — bundles roughly the thickness of a garden hose, carrying continents' worth of conversation as pulses of light. When you open a WEBPAGE hosted abroad, your request crosses an ocean along the bottom of it, reaches a SERVER, and comes back, usually in less time than it takes to blink.
That is worth knowing because it reframes what BROADBAND, WIFI, a ROUTER and a HOTSPOT actually are. None of them is the internet. They are the last few metres of the journey — the bit between your device and the cable in the street. It is also why the connection can feel slow even on a fast package: the distance to the SERVER matters as much as the speed at your end.
Every site needs an address, too. A DOMAIN is the human-readable version of one — machines route by number, so a lookup quietly translates the name you typed into the digits they actually use, before the page even begins loading. That translation is a separate system from the site itself, which is why a WEBSITE can be unreachable while the machine hosting it is running perfectly well.
Words that came from nowhere in particular
The vocabulary of going ONLINE was mostly improvised by individuals, quite recently. Ray Tomlinson picked the @ symbol for EMAIL addresses in 1971 for two blunt reasons: it already meant 'at', and it was almost the only character on the keyboard that never turned up inside anybody's name. The HASHTAG was suggested by Chris Messina on Twitter in 2007 — a proposal, not a company decision, that everybody simply adopted. SURFING the net was popularised by a librarian, Jean Armour Polly, in 1992. A COOKIE takes its name from 'magic cookie', a programmers' term for a small token passed back and forth.
Two of these words hide something worth explaining. The CLOUD is not a cloud: it means your files sit on somebody else's SERVER computers, reachable from anywhere, which is convenient and is also why a PASSWORD and a careful LOGIN matter. And a COOKIE is how a site recognises you on your next visit — handy when it remembers your settings, less so when it follows you around, and the reason every site now asks permission before setting one.