cyberspace

Blend of cybernetics +‎ space, coined by science-fiction writer William Gibson in his 1982 short story collection Burning Chrome and popularized in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈsaɪ.bə(ɹ)ˌspeɪs/
• enPR: SAÏ-buhr-speïs

cyberspace (countable and uncountable, plural cyberspaces)

1. A world of information through the Internet.
2. (by extension) The internet as a whole.
   • 2012 April 19, Josh Halliday, “Free speech haven or lawless cesspool – can the internet be civilised?”, in the Guardian‎:

     However, some have accused cyberspace of provoking a dangerous collapse in the old order of civilised society. The shift in the balance of power online has given rise to a more powerful concern: the rise of the uncivil web.

3. (science fiction) A three-dimensional representation of virtual space in a computer network.
   • 1982 July, Gibson, William, “Burning Chrome”, in Omni, volume 4, number 10, page 72:

     I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven’, but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

   • 1984, Gibson, William, Neuromancer, page 51:

     Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…

• “cyberspace” in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2007, →ISBN, page 31.
• cyberspace n. at the OED Science Fiction Citations Project

• cyberspace on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• cyberscape