In October 1953, I coined the word 'software' (1995)
niquette.com
niquette.com
What’s between hardware and software?
Firmware
Hard - Firm - Soft
Maybe I never saw it since I am not a native English speaker. But better late than never
Like:
Heavy Metal - Metal - HardRock - Soft Rock
For example, the designs we build usually involve electronics, an FPGA, and a 'normal' processor. It's not formal terminology, but we usually refer to them as hardware (electronics), firmware (FPGA code) and software (C/Python/etc code).
If you freeze the tomato, it will be hard.
If you wait for a few days, it will become soft.
Another example is a handshake. A soft handshake is what you shouldn't do (like handshaking a fish), a hard handshake you shouldn't do either (because it will hurt the other person), the best handshake is a firm (or solid) handshake.
"Firm" is not quite hard, but not soft either.
"Soft" is not hard at all.
A good analogy would be cooking steak;
- Hard = well done - Firm = medium - Soft = rare
Edit: explaining this was harder than I initially thought...
I wouldn't guess that firm is between hard and soft in English.
Tight refers to density, strong to cohesion. So something within that range that's very dense and cohesive is hard, and something that isn't is soft.
Byte - Nibble - Bit
But now "heavy metal" has an additional meaning: the traditional 1970s/1980s style of heavy metal, e.g. Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest. "Heavy metal" in this sense is a sub-genre of "heavy metal" in the previous sense.
Most fans of "heavy metal" in the first sense abbreviate it to "metal", and use "heavy metal" specifically for the older style. With these meanings, "metal" includes extreme metal styles, e.g. death/black metal, so it's on average harder than "heavy metal".
> I took down from my shelf The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which is not the OED but one I happen to like a whole lot. Now, there are 1,491 pages with definitions on them. I did a quick count of the words defined on a couple of randomly selected pages and got an estimate of 25.5 words. You can do the indicated arithmetic, of course, but I'll save you the trouble: 1,491 times 25.5 equals 38,020 words.