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If I refer to the status of something as enabled and disabled, the verb is to enable and to disable.

Are there comparable single words for the status of something being online and offline? So far I've got "put online" and "take offline".

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  • You might want to edit your text a bit. Clearly you seek a verb, but "words for the status of something" can only mean adjectives.
    – FumbleFingers
    Sep 5, 2011 at 16:36

8 Answers 8

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"put online" and "take offline" are used for things, like servers or services.

"come online" and "go offline" are used to describe the action of a user using one of those services when he performs a login or logoff

So, sequentially, the service has to be put online, so that the users can come online inside that service. If the service is put offline, all users inside that service are forced to go offline.

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Connected and disconnected.

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As far as I know, to come online and to go offline are used in different online chat rooms/MMOs' ingame chats and other such systems.

Edit: Your own suggestion is another good variant, applicable if there is someone/something else that performs the operation. E.g. My friend went offline right in the middle of discussion vs. We had to take the server offline to perform maintenance on it.

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  • OP specifically asked for "single words", implicitly rejecting in advance such combinations as go/put/take/come on/offline
    – FumbleFingers
    Sep 5, 2011 at 16:33
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    Why not just "verb" the words and say "onlined" and "offlined"? Inspired by Calvin and Hobbes!
    – jyc23
    Sep 5, 2011 at 18:06
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    @jyc23 It may be just me, but I hate this practice. Both in English and in my native language (where it sounds simply awfull). Why reinvent the wheel, when there are already established phrases for it?
    – Philoto
    Sep 6, 2011 at 6:48
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In this day and age, if some resource is capable of being online at all, that is its 'normal' status.

The word offline does sometimes get used as a verb, as in "I need to offline the server".

I don't know of any similar usage for the opposite process (I've never come across "Online the server", for instance). Most people simply say "reconnect", or "put/get back online".

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  • I thought the appropriate term for online-ness nowadays has become live, as in 'the website has gone live'.
    – user12549
    Sep 5, 2011 at 15:59
  • @myqlarson: I think most websites would have been "online" for some time before "going live". It's just that they weren't publicly accessible and/or publicised before the "go live" date.
    – FumbleFingers
    Sep 5, 2011 at 16:13
  • true. good point.
    – user12549
    Sep 5, 2011 at 16:27
  • What's the opposite of going live?
    – Matt
    Sep 5, 2011 at 17:28
  • @Matt: I don't think it's meaningful to talk of an 'opposite' to going live. It's like, for example, reaching puberty - either you do it, or you don't. Except that if you don't reach puberty then probably at least some medical people will talk about the situation. If your website doesn't go live, who would ever talk about it? And what would it even mean to call something a website in that case? My email address book isn't "live" in that sense, but I don't need a special word to describe what I've done to make it not publicly accessible.
    – FumbleFingers
    Sep 5, 2011 at 17:41
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If the context is correct (i.e. it is established we are talking about something on the Internet) then you can say available and unavailable, although that's for state and not a verb, so you would end up saying make available and make unavailable which puts you in a similarly verbose position.

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"online" is not a verb; you cannot "online" something. You can go online, but then "go" is the verb.

It might be the case that you could think of "to go online" as a phrasal verb -- I suspect that in the future, "to go online" will become an accepted phrasal verb, but I doubt that "online" itself will every become a verb.

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From the users' perspective, a website is accessible when it is online, and inaccessible when it isn't.

EDIT: You're necessarily looking for one-word. One option is Activated / Deactivated.

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Here's my two bits:

Log on and Log off

When you Log on, you are online, when you log off, you are offline

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