silicon valley
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.92 in modern English
21
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
5
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
Originally, the region of the San Francisco Bay Area in which there were a high number of industries producing silicon chips; later extended to mean the entire concentration of high-tech businesses in this area.
Countable; Informal; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "The community of radio amateurs—trespassing fiddlers on the cutting edge of technological possibilities—prefigured the geek community that was to inhabit Silicon Valley 50 years later."
- "Since the launch early last year of Udacity and Coursera, two Silicon Valley start-ups offering free education through MOOCs, massive open online courses, the ivory towers of academia have been shaken to their foundations. University brands built in some cases over centuries have been forced to contemplate the possibility that information technology will rapidly make their existing business model obsolete."
- "CEO and cofounder Alex Karp distanced Palantir from other Silicon Valley technology companies in a letter included in the filing, writing that “we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments.”"
- "The belief in the early 1980s among many European pundits that a series of European Silicon Valleys could be developed before the end of the decade flew in the face of all the United States evidence."
Etymology
From Silicon Valley USA, the title of a series of articles appearing in 1971 in Electronic News by the journalist Don Hoefler, from silicon, an important element in semiconductor manufacturing + valley from Santa Clara Valley, the area where many of these industries are located.
Usage
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Places.