What Does PHP Stand For Originally and Now?

PHP is one of the most widely used server-side scripting languages on the web today, powering millions of websites including WordPress and Wikipedia. This article explains the history behind its name, exploring what the PHP acronym originally stood for when it was first created and what it represents in the modern programming world today.

The Original Meaning: Personal Home Page

When PHP was first created in 1994 by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf, it was not intended to be a new programming language. Instead, Lerdorf wrote a suite of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in C to maintain his personal homepage and track visitors to his online resume.

He named this collection of tools Personal Home Page Tools, which was quickly abbreviated to PHP Tools or simply PHP.

Over the next few years, Lerdorf expanded the tools to package database interactions and form parsing, releasing the source code to the public in 1995 as “Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter” (PHP/FI).

The Modern Meaning: Hypertext Preprocessor

As the software grew in popularity, other developers joined the project. In 1997, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser from scratch, forming the base for PHP 3.0. Because the language had evolved far beyond simple personal homepage tools, the team decided to change the name to better reflect its utility as a professional, enterprise-grade programming language.

Today, PHP officially stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

This is a recursive acronym, which is a naming convention in computer science where the acronym refers back to itself. In this case, the first letter “P” stands for “PHP,” the “H” stands for “Hypertext,” and the second “P” stands for “Preprocessor.”

A hypertext preprocessor is a tool that processes code on the web server before delivering the final HTML page to the user’s web browser.