Bonjour

Bonjour is a French greeting that translates to "hello" or "good day." It is commonly used in French-speaking regions and in contexts ranging from casual to formal. The term derives from the combination of bon (good) and jour (day) and has long been a standard daytime salutation, typically used from morning through early afternoon. In everyday conversation, alternatives include salut for informal situations and bonsoir for the evening.

In addition to the greeting, Bonjour is the name of Apple’s zero-configuration networking technology. Originally developed by Apple and introduced in the early 2000s (under the name Rendezvous), Bonjour enables devices and services on a local network to discover each other automatically without manual configuration. The technology relies on multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) to advertise and locate services such as printers, file sharing, iTunes, AirPlay, and other networked devices. Bonjour is built into macOS and iOS and has been extended to Windows and Linux via open-source implementations and third-party software. Its cross-platform nature has helped it become a widely used mechanism for seamless device discovery in home and small-business networks.

While the two meanings share the same word, they occupy different domains: a common linguistic greeting in French-speaking communities, and a technical protocol for automatic network service discovery. The dual use of Bonjour illustrates how a single term can have both a linguistic and a technological footprint.