9 December 2020
The verb to hack means, of course, to cut or chop, but it also has developed a sense of to gain unauthorized access to a computer system. The connection between the two senses isn’t obvious when you look at the two ends of the word’s history, but when you fill in the gap between the two, the word’s semantic development becomes clear.
Old English had the verb ahaccian, meaning to cut, and we believe that the form *haccian also existed, although that form isn’t attested in any of the extant manuscripts. And ahaccian only appears once, in a homily about the legend of the seven sleepers. The homily was once attributed to Ælfric, but today most scholars don’t believe that he wrote it:
man sette heora heafda swilce oþra ðeofa buton ðam port-weallon on ðam heafod-stoccum, and ðær flugon sona to hrocas and hremmas and feala cynna fugelas, and þara haligra martyra eagan ut ahaccedon
(They set their heads, like those of others who were thieves, outside the town walls upon head-stakes, and immediately rooks and ravens and birds of many kinds flew there and hacked out the eyes of the holy martyrs.)
We do see the hack form in Middle English. From a twelfth century hagiography of John the Baptist:
þo cneu seint iohan þat gif he wolde þolen þat king drige his unriht he mihte liuen and ben him lief and wurð ac gif he wolde folgen ri(h)twisnesse he shoulde þerfore his lif forleten and swo did atten ende. for þat a maiden bad te kinge his heued. and he hit bad of acken. and hire bitechen. and he þat eðeliche deað admodliche þolede. and þer mid bigat eche life en blisse.
(Then Saint John knew that if he should suffer the king to commit his sin he might live and be loved and honored by him, but if he should follow righteousness he would therefore lost his life and that last. For a made bade the king for his head, and he bade it hacked off and given to her, and he that readily and meekly suffered death and therewith obtained eternal life in bliss.)
And in the thirteenth century we see hacker as a personal name, probably referring to a reaper or other agricultural worker. In records of the county of Sussex, England from 1296 we see the names Johanne Hakyere and Willmo Hakyere.
But a hacker could also be an agricultural implement, similar to a hoe. From John Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things):
And for scharpenesse and prikkynge vnnethe þornes beth yfalle or yrooted out of þe grounde wihtoute hook, bille, hakker, or som oþer egge tool.
(And because of sharpness and pricking, thorns are not easily cut or rooted out of the ground without a hook, bill, hacker, or some other edged tool.)
And that’s where things stood for several hundred years. But in early nineteenth-century America, hack began to be used as a noun meaning a try or attempt at something. We see the same semantic development in to take a cut at or to take swing at something. From Joseph Plumb Martin’s 1830 memoir of his Revolutionary War experiences:
We remained the rest of the day and the following night, expecting to have another hack at them in the morning, but they gave us the slip.
And in the 1950s, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began to use the word as a verb meaning to work on or play with a technical system. From the minutes of M.I.T.’s Tech Model Railroad Club from 5 April 1955:
Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.
The use of both working and hacking here indicates the M.I.T. students differentiated the two actions, with hacking being more playful and experimental.
In subsequent years M.I.T. students began to use the verb to hack and hacker to refer to manipulating the school’s telephone system in order to make free long-distance calls or otherwise create mayhem and to those who did so. From the school’s newspaper, The Tech, of 20 November 1963:
Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system.
[...]
The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found.
[...]
Because of the “hacking,” the majority of the MIT phones are “trapped.” They are set up so tie-line calls may not be made. Originally, these tie-lines were open to general use.
And from M.I.T. the word spread to the wider tech world, and as technology evolved, from analog telephone switches to digital computers and the internet.
Sources:
Ælfric. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1 of 3. Early English Text Society, O.S. 76 and 82. London: Oxford UP, 1885, 492. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. a-haccian.
Hudson, William. The Three Earliest Subsidies for the County of Sussex. Sussex Record Society, 10. London: Mitchell Hughes and Clarke, 1910, 101. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Lichstein, Henry. “Telephone Hackers Active.” The Tech, 83.24, 20 November 1963, 1.
Martin, Joseph Plumb. A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier. Hallowell, Maine: Glazier, Masters and Co., 1830, 96. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hakker(e n. and hakken, v.
Morris, R., ed. “De Sancto Iohanne babtista.” Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century. London: N. Trübner, 1873, 139–141. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.52.
Onorato, Joseph and Mark Schupack, Tech Model Railroad Club of M.I.T.: The First Fifty Years (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 66.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. hacker, n., hack, n.1, and hack, v.1.
Seymore, M.C., et al, eds. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 2 of 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 1047. HathiTrust Digital Archive.