Podcast Day: The Word Was Made Up to Fill a Page on Deadline

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Woody Magazine

We write the things that aren't news

Sept. 30, 2026 (Wed.)

A Word at a TimeSept. 30, 2026

It's International Podcast Day. The Word Was Made Up to Fill a Page on Deadline.

Its second half comes from an 18th-century farming term for scattering seed. A podcast, meanwhile, goes only to people who ask for it.

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In Three Lines

  1. "Podcasting" was one of three names a British reporter tossed into a story in February 2004 while racing a deadline.
  2. The "cast" comes from "broadcast," a farming term for sowing seed by hand, and the Japanese and Korean word for broadcasting also means a message sent without an addressee.
  3. This is no complaint about the name. It took hold before the medium settled into its shape, and it has outlived the iPod.

Today, Sept. 30, is International Podcast Day. In January, Edison Research asked Americans 12 and older whether they had listened to or watched a podcast in the past week. Forty-five percent said yes, the highest share the survey has recorded.

45%
Americans 12 and older who listened to or watched a podcast in the past week, about 130 million people (Edison Research, January 2026)

Most of us file podcasts under radio that happens to live online, and that is a fair instinct. There are hosts and episodes, and the word itself carries the tail end of "broadcast." Take the word apart, though, and the pieces point somewhere else.

A deadline at The Guardian, February 2004

The word's earliest known appearance in print came on Feb. 12, 2004, in The Guardian. Ben Hammersley, a technology writer, had filed a piece called "Audible revolution."

His argument was simple. MP3 players like Apple's iPod were in plenty of pockets, recording software was cheap or free, and blogging had taken hold. Everything was in place for a boom in amateur radio. Then he asked what to call it.

Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?

He never picked one. Accounts of the episode say the story was running short and he needed words to fill the space. Helen Zaltzman, host of the language podcast The Allusionist, tells it this way: the deadline was looming, and he came up with the names in desperation. When she later interviewed him, he summed up the result in two words: "I'm sorry."

Other people made it stick

For months after the article ran, almost no one used the word. It began to spread that September, on a mailing list. On Sept. 13, Adam Curry, a former MTV host, opened a list for developers of iPodder, a program that moved audio files from the web onto an iPod.

Within days, Dannie Gregoire, a programmer in Kentucky, used the word "podcaster" in a post. According to Dave Winer, a software developer who worked with Curry, he and Curry agreed over the phone that the activity needed a name and that this one would do.

After that it moved fast. In December 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary named "podcast" its word of the year. Less than two years had passed since Hammersley's deadline.

"Broadcast" was a farming word

Now the second half. "Cast" comes from "broadcast," and the older word is literal: broad, as in wide, and cast, as in throw. When "broadcast" first shows up in English, in 1767, it describes sowing seed by hand, flung widely over a field.

Seed scattered that way lands wherever it lands. The sower does not choose the spot, and that is the whole difference from planting one seed at a time in a furrow.

Radio borrowed the word in the early 1920s. The verb appears in its radio sense in 1921, the noun in 1922. The fit was good. A transmitter sent its signal out, and the station had no way of knowing which receivers picked it up.

A logbook in the Indian Ocean, 1917

Japan arrived at a similar word by a different route. The Japanese term for broadcasting, hōsō, which Korean shares as bangsong, is written with two Chinese characters meaning "release" and "send." The message goes out and is left to go where it will.

According to Nipponica, the Japanese encyclopedia, the word was first used in January 1917 aboard the Mishima Maru, a Japanese ship crossing the Indian Ocean. The ship's radio operator picked up a wireless message with no known sender and no addressee. In the log he kept for the Ministry of Communications, he is said to have recorded it as a hōsō received.

The term entered Japanese wireless regulations in 1919. In 1922, as officials drew up rules for radio, it was adopted as the translation of "broadcasting." When Korea's first station began regular broadcasts on Feb. 16, 1927, under Japanese colonial rule, it carried the same word in its name: the Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station. Gyeongseong was what Seoul was called then.

In English and in Japanese, then, the word describes a sender who does not choose the receiver.

A podcast waits to be asked

Podcasts don't work that way. The technology traces back to Christmas Day 2000, when Winer released version 0.92 of RSS, a format websites use to publish lists of new posts. He added an element called "enclosure," which let a post carry the address of an audio file. Hammersley, as it happens, had written a book on RSS for O'Reilly the year before he named the medium.

Subscribe to a show's feed, and when a new episode is posted, the app follows that address and downloads the file on its own. The file is never scattered over the air. It goes to people who subscribed or came looking for it.

Anyone can find a podcast and play it, so the difference can sound academic. That is fair: podcasts, like radio, are open to anyone. What changed is who moves first. A radio station picks the hour and sends the program, and whoever is tuned in hears it. A podcast arrives only after the listener reaches out. Measured against the farmer in the word, the order runs backward.

The iPod has been gone since 2022

The first half has fared no better. Apple announced the end of the iPod, which gave the word its "pod," on May 10, 2022, saying the iPod touch, its last model, would be sold only while supplies lasted.

This year's Edison survey found that 57 percent of Americans 12 and older had both listened to a podcast and watched one on a screen. The device behind the name is gone, and people now watch podcasts as well as hear them. We still call it a podcast.

Neither half of Hammersley's word fits anymore, and the name has not budged. In the fall of 2004, a handful of people needed a word for what they were doing, and this one happened to be lying around. "Podcast" shows what happens when a name settles in before its meaning does. The farmer in the word is still scattering seed. The seed goes to whoever held out a hand.

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Sources

Woody Magazine is edited and published by Woody. Claude AI is used as a tool in the editorial process, and all editorial judgment and final responsibility rest with the editorial desk. Readers are encouraged to verify independently.

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