What does PHP Stand For?
* Web 2.0 University is supported by it's audience. If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commision.
PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page,” as it was initially developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to manage his personal website. Lerdorf created a set of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts in C, which he called “Personal Home Page Tools.” These tools allowed users to create simple web applications, maintain guestbooks, and track website visitors.
Over time, PHP evolved into a more powerful and capable scripting language, with contributions from many developers. As its capabilities expanded beyond just personal home pages, the meaning of the acronym was changed to “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.” This new name is a recursive acronym, a common naming convention in the programming world where the first letter of the acronym refers to the acronym itself.
Today, PHP is a widely used server-side scripting language for web development, powering content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, and web applications across various domains.