Meanings
PHP1
- abbreviationinitialismuncountablemedicineInitialism of pseudohypoparathyroidism.
- abbreviationinitialismInitialism of Primary Health Properties.
It has fielded seven proposals from PHP and a U.S. consortium of KKR (KKR.N), opens new tab and Stonepeak Partners in recent weeks.
2025 April 7, “UK's Assura gets deadline extension for potential PHP deal”, in Reuters, archived from the original on 08 Apr 2025
PHP2
- computer languagesA scripting language widely used to write Web applications.
Developers at an open source company in Spain are leading an effort to boost PHP application development for Android-based phones.
2010 July 17, “PHP development comes to Google Android”, in Reuters, archived from the original on 14 Jun 20261 more example
The final thrust of Bob's argument is that if you strip away all disk I/O (and he cites the move to SSD persistent storage), we'll shift away from interpreted languages such as Ruby and PHP and back to Java.
2011 October 17, Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, “Java's second coming? Over my cold, dead RAM-cached database”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 27 Jun 2022
plural PHPs
- informalA PHP script.
Once I get this, I am not able to run a PHP that uses those include files again.
2006 March 26, Jim Michaels, “mysql_connect() losing connections from cmd line”, in comp.lang.php (Usenet), archived from the original on 04 Jul 20262 more examples
At first, I had the PHPs on the university host requesting the data from MySQL on my ISP's host.
2002 December 11, Amittai Aviram, “Moving files between hosts”, in comp.lang.php (Usenet), archived from the original on 04 Jul 2026Actually, my site goes to index.php and then index.php digs around in other PHPs and MySQL.
2007 January 31, Nu, “How do I limit my number of PHP hits per second?”, in comp.lang.php (Usenet), archived from the original on 04 Jul 2026
Origin
Originally an initialism of personal home page, used to describe a set of tools written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. With the advent of PHP 3 which was no longer a limited language it was renamed to a recursive backronym: PHP: hypertext preprocessor.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
PHP. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/PHP
“PHP.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/PHP. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “PHP,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/PHP.
Source: PHP on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.