When I was eight, I asked my brother what ASCII meant. “ASCII is a secret military code. I’ve managed to break it,” he said, “and I read their plans to kidnap you.”

Like many other tech terms, ASCII is an unclear acronym, easily confusing businesspeople and eight-year-olds alike. My brother was partially right — it’s a simple code for representing letters, punctuation marks, and digits as ones and zeroes. It stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and people pronounce it “asky”. It’s far from secret.

“Cloud computing” is a much newer term. It refers to web-based applications like Google Mail, where data and software live in a network somewhere, and not on your hard drive. For definitions of these and other tech terms, check out Hewlett Packard’s list of baffling IT terms.

If you’re unsure about the meaning of a catchy new tech term, chances are good your readers will be uncertain, too. Because technology grows so quickly, it spawns new words at a breathtaking speed. Many of these words are useful, but until they’re widely known it’s helpful to clarify their meanings for your reader.