The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) does not include the word password in its dictionary. The term, however, is very popular in our language, although it can be replaced by a password or key, notions that are accepted by the RAE.
A password is a combination of letters and / or numbers that provides, to those who know it, the possibility of accessing a resource. The password serves as protection and as a security mechanism: those people who do not know the password cannot access the resource in question.
Suppose a man wants to withdraw money from an automated teller machine or ATM. For this, you must enter a card into the machine and mention your password. Only if your deposit is correct (that is, if it matches the sequence of characters that you registered in the system), will you be able to withdraw the money. No person who does not know the password will have the possibility of accessing the bank account of this individual and thus withdraw money, unless they commit a crime and violate security.
Passwords also protect e-mail accounts (email) and other services on the Internet (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.). When registering, the user chooses a password that only he must know. In this way, no one can use your email or your profile on social networks without your consent.
At present, it is very common for users to choose passwords that are difficult for others to deduce in account creation forms (for example, it is not advisable to build them with data such as date of birth, first name or part your username). In some cases, this becomes a requirement, so that certain rules are established to consider a security key valid; the most normal thing is that they are asked to include at least one uppercase letter and a number, and that their extension is not less than a certain number of characters.
Since the password of a router is something that most users should not use very often, the ideal is to create a string of characters that is very difficult to remember and that has no relation to our personal data, and write it down on a sheet; the effort of copying it every time it is used is better than the risk of a neighbor taking advantage of our connection without permission for having chosen a too simple key and a precarious security standard, such as WEP.
The use of passwords is very old, although their characteristics changed over time. Previously, the guards who controlled access to a certain place only allowed those who knew a keyword to pass. Currently, a password is usually a combination of letters and numbers that is encrypted in computer systems to avoid being compromised.
It should be noted that the term should be considered a feminine noun, since a literal translation of it could be "pass word" or "word to pass" (the two words that make it up are " step " and "word"). Assigning the wrong gender to a term of foreign origin occurs more frequently than it should, as do mispronunciations and misinterpretations of its meanings.