Bluetooth is a wireless networking standard that uses radio frequencies to set up a communications link between devices. The name comes from Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century Danish king who united the provinces of Denmark under a single crown, the same way that, theoretically, Bluetooth will unite the world of portable, wireless devices under a single standard. Why name a modern technology after an obscure Danish king? Here's a clue: two of the most important companies backing the Bluetooth standard — Ericsson and Nokia — are Scandinavian.

Piconet combines the prefix pico-, "very small; one trillionth," with the noun network. And, just so you know, if you have a piconet operating at a particular frequency and one or more other piconets operating on different frequencies, they can communicate with each other, and the resulting network is called a scatternet:

"Several piconets can communicate with each other simultaneously, creating a 'scatternet' that links, say, all the people around a conference table." —"Is Bluetooth worth the wait?," The Economist, December 9, 2000