It’s Warez.

"wah-rez"

Wait what? It’s pronounced like the city in Mexico?

I've heard a lot of people pronounce it like that, but I'm pretty sure that's not correct. It's clearly the English word "wares"[1] with the S replaced with a Z, similar to "hackz" and "cheatz", which were also common in that era. I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came from people seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the original word behind it.

[1] A synonym for "goods" or "products". See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wares

It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc.

Anyway, by 1990, in the piracy circles I distantly associated with, it was quite common to pronounce it like "juarez". Sort of semi-ironically, like, it's obviously the wrong pronunciation, but nonetheless everyone uses that pronunciation on purpose. So, what could be more correct than "the thing everyone does"?

Of course, pronunciation only happens in meatspace (or at least it did back before MP3s and before YouTube and so on), and of course I'm talking about clusters of teenagers separated by thousands of km. We had "meetupz" or "meetz" in my city, which is how I know how "everyone" pronounced it... but it's certainly possible that in most cities/whatever there was some other pronunciation rule.

> It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc.

Citation needed there.

I have always assumed it came from fleamarkets where people selling pirated VHS films and knock-off Rolexes would be described as “selling their wares”. Changing the s to a z was an obvious step in 90s internet culture.

Okay, so my citation is, I was there, I was a (fringe) participant in pre-internet piracy culture, starting in 1990.

Pirate BBSes would have various "goods" (in the sense you and GP mean) available for download, including images (hint: some of them may have involve ladies), text files, and software. Sometimes there would also be sections for various art media created by users, such as .mods or ASCII art or poetry or whatever. Those various "goods" would never be all slopped together, they'd be divided into categories. And the category called "warez" would never, ever, have anything in it other than pirated software.

I agree that the s-to-z thing is just classic hacker/leet culture, though it's not internet culture, because it predates the people in question having internet access. I'm saying that the "wares" that becomes "warez" is not "wares-as-in-goods", it's "wares-as-in-softwares". It's pluralized even though "software" is a non-count noun, because then it fits with "files", "images", and so on. And yes, ultimately the "-ware" in "software" is from the sense that you and GP are talking about; I'm saying that the etymology is not directly from there, because otherwise all the other kinds of pirated stuff would also be "warez", and it never, ever, was.

I'm not sure how you are missing it, but hardware and software both etymologically have ware (as in a manufactured article, product, or merchandise) built-in to them. Without ware, there would be no hardware or software, or warez. The root of these words, also silverware, cookware, courseware, Tupperware, Corningware, etc., indeed is "ware." And wares is merely the plural of ware.

I too never seen "warez" used to refer to anything other than pirated software. You make a good point about the derivation; it probably is directly from "software". Adding a superfluous Z to the end of a plural mass noun was also a characteristic of l33tspeak, as I recall.

> I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came from people seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the original word behind it.

I think it was explicitly luls a lot of the time. I saw "warez" spelled as "juar3z", etc, a lot.

To be fair, L-thirtythreet-speak pronunciations can be quite confusing!

This reminds me, my friend and I were the only people we knew who'd even used the internet in the late 90s so no one was around to correct us, and 3 of the apparently incorrect pronounciations we had agreed on were:

- war-ehz

- gee-aw-cit-eez

- jif

oh my god rapidshare was hot garbage