internets

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of internet.

   Large corporations sometimes build private internets that never touch the public network.

   The two research teams compared their experimental internets side by side.

   Note

   Only one meaning of internet can take a plural: the countable one, any set of computer networks that communicate by the Internet Protocol, a company intranet included. Internet in the sense of access or connection is uncountable, and the global network is a single proper name. A plural applied to that global network is no longer a count. It is the joking plural.

2. 2
   nounhumorous

   A humorous name for the Internet, used as though it were more than one thing.

   She found the recipe somewhere on the internets and never wrote down the source.

   Whenever the office Wi-Fi dies, he jokes that the internets are broken again.

   Similarweb, net

   Note

   A joke with a precise birthday. George W. Bush, debating John Kerry in 2004, said he had heard "rumors on the internets," and the plural stuck as shorthand for being out of touch with technology. Garrett M. Graff's The First Campaign (2007) pairs it with "the Google." It always takes the. Michele Zappavigna's Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (2012) already calls the meme outdated, so use it knowingly.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of internet.

   She internets late into the night whenever a deadline looms.

   Whenever he gets bored, he just internets aimlessly until something catches his eye.

   Note

   The verb shares its spelling with the plural noun, and the grammar around it tells them apart: two internets is a count, she internets is an action. Most often it is the informal, intransitive verb, with no object. With an object it means connecting something to a network. A rare, archaic use meant entwining several things together into a web.

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