CAPTCHA

See also: captcha and Captcha

English

A typical representation of a CAPTCHA

Coined by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 as a loose acronym of “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”.

CAPTCHA (plural CAPTCHAs)

(computing, Internet) A computerized test requiring the human user to perform a task deemed to be difficult to automate, such as entering a displayed series of distorted characters or describing images, to demonstrate that they are a human and not a computer program.
- 2011, Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto, The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN:
  CAPTCHA puzzles are intended to be easy for a human to solve but difficult for a computer. Because of the monetary value to spammers of circumventing these controls, an arms race has occurred in which typical CAPTCHA puzzles have […]
- 2014, Laura Fitton, Anum Hussain, Brittany Leaning, Twitter For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 24:
  A CAPTCHA is a quick check to make sure that an actual person, rather than a computer program, is using the website. Web applications use CAPTCHA […]

computerized test

Borrowed from English.

CAPTCHA m (plural CAPTCHA's)