r/EnglishLearning • u/falsoTrolol Non-Native Speaker of English • 1d ago
⭐️ Vocabulary / Semantics What does "burn" mean here?
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u/Middcore Native Speaker 1d ago
Data was/is put on a CD by a laser etching on the disk's surface, this the colloquialisms "burning" a CD and "CD burner" (for a read/write-capable CD-ROM drive).
The fact that you have to ask helps make the point about how completely that era has faded into the past.
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u/SkinnyRunningDude Advanced 1d ago
When I was a kid in the mid-to-late 00s, one of the household chores I had to do was to rip and burn music CDs onto blanks for our car's CD changer. Even if the music CDs were genuine, no one wanted to risk scatching the physical disc on a rough road trip.
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u/wejunkin New Poster 1d ago
Writing data onto an optical disc (CD, DVD, etc.) is called "burning." The opposite operation (extracting data from the CD onto a computer) is called "ripping."
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
ripping is still in use today among pirates
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u/wejunkin New Poster 1d ago
Unlike other commenters, I wouldn't say these terms are outdated at all.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
burning is very much outdated simply because we don't use CDs anymore. Most of the world's anglophone population grew up at a time where they did not use CDs as a medium of storage.
This is reflected in the fact that if you buy a writeable CD today, and a CD player as well, and attach it to a computer, you wouldn't see the 'burn' or the 'rip' options, instead you are more likely to see 'copy' or 'paste' or 'transfer' etc.
Ripping is still used to mean copying stuff from a medium (whether that's a BluRay or Netflix) to store it elsewhere. Although this is only used if the medium is not intended to be copy-able. If you were grabbing some files from a USB drive, you would call that copying, not ripping. This is why 'ripping' is largely only ever used by digital pirates.
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u/millers_left_shoe Non-Native Speaker of English 1d ago
I’m 23 and I definitely grew up using CDs, so does this mean most of the world’s anglophone population is younger than 23?
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
Different countries adopt technologies differently. Practically nobody in China uses a credit card. Practically nobody in the US uses mobile payment. Japan still uses floppy disks.
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u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 1d ago
The US still uses floppies as well in a lot of government and airport installations.
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u/Successful_Cress6639 New Poster 22h ago
These facilities should all be equipped with don't copy that floppy posters.
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u/wejunkin New Poster 1d ago
You* don't use CDs anymore.
Also, ripping has nothing to do with whether or not data is intended to be copied. You don't use rip with USB because it is stored in solid state memory and does not need to be decoded via a medium the way an optical disc does. Copying bits from a USB truly is a different operation than ripping data from a CD, the different terms reflect that.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
Also, ripping has nothing to do with whether or not data is intended to be copied
Actually it does.
You don't use rip with USB because it is stored in solid state memory and does not need to be decoded via a medium the way an optical disc does
Ripping has nothing to do with the physical media being used. You can rip a website. It's called a webrip. You can rip a Nintendo game cartridge. Cartridges are flash memory. Ripping in the modern context means making a copy of something that's not primarily intended to be copyable.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nobody uses CDs anymore mate. Why would you still use CDs? Did you just wake up from a twenty year coma? If I hand a random young person on the street a random CD, 9 times out of ten I guarantee you that they wouldn't know how to hold one (thumb around the rim, index finger in the hole, claw grip) and would just grab it by the shiny side because they've never touched one.
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u/TrashCanEnigma Native Speaker 1d ago
Hi. Young person here. We weren't all dropped on our damn heads. Unless you're referring to elementary schoolers, we know how to hold a damn disk. Check into your nearest nursing home.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
We weren't all dropped on our damn heads
The CD crowd is out here in full force today lol. Just because you don't know how to use a CD doesn't mean you are dumb. Its okay. Relax. I don't know how to operate a floppy disk drive or wind tape either.
we know how to hold a damn disk
Maybe you* know. Most people don't lol. Sorry, this isn't some sort of benchmark you need to clear to be accepted into wider society. Most young people don't and that's okay.
Check into your nearest nursing home
You should do that. You know how to hold a disk you can't be that old
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u/Usual_Ice636 Native Speaker 1d ago
CD sales are actually up the last 2 years.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
So are vinyl record sales. Collectors and hobbyists.
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u/Usual_Ice636 Native Speaker 1d ago
Recordable CDs are holding steady though. over a billion a year.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
Many of them are used for archival purposes by enterprise customers. Not by normal people. And also in certain less developed countries. Anglophone countries rarely ever use CDs anymore especially for consumer purposes.
Oh, and by the way, when these businesses buy these CDs, they use their computers to 'copy' and 'archive' data onto them, and not 'burn' them.
Language evolves. Sorry it didn't stay the way you wanted it.
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u/Weekly-Beginning-229 New Poster 1d ago
This made me wonder if in the future people will collect CDs like vinyls
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u/wejunkin New Poster 1d ago
? Contemporary music is still pressed to CDs and other optical disc formats are still widely used (especially Blu-Ray). Many fields of work and hobbies have plenty of reason to use the term "burn" even if most people don't. CDs are nowhere near obsolete.
Your faith in the youth is also cartoonishly low (in a way that makes you seem foolish). You don't think a 20 year old has ever seen a video game disc? A DVD? Be serious.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago edited 1d ago
BluRay's are not CDs. DVDs are not CDs. We are not talking about the same thing here. CDs are outdated and obsolete.
Contemporary music is also pressed into Vinyl records for hobbyists, doesn't mean vinyl records aren't outdated. Outdated != not produced. Outdated simply means it is old and inferior and practically nobody uses it anymore
Your faith in the youth is also cartoonishly low
And what the fuck do you mean faith in the youth? As if knowing how to use a CD makes someone redeemable. Fuck off with that. Knowing how to handle a CD is not a useful skill insofar as young people are concerned. I haven't touched a CD in at least a decade and not for not wanting to
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u/wejunkin New Poster 1d ago
BluRays and DVDs are equivalent to CDs in regards to your idiotic comment about young people.
CDs are outdated and obsolete
Outdated and obsolete are not the same thing. CDs are not obsolete. Your argument that "no one uses CDs" is so transparently incorrect that I can't understand how you're still going.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 1d ago
BluRays and DVDs are equivalent to CDs in regards to your idiotic comment about young people.
What the fuck are you talking about lol they are not. These are clearly different formats. A BluRay doesn't work in a CD player.
CDs are not obsolete.
I am sorry, they just are. I don't know what you want me to tell you. CDs are clearly inferior and just bad. Disks that hold 650 MB of data are just obsolete in 2026 lol.
Your argument that "no one uses CDs" is so transparently incorrect
It is literally not incorrect. Nobody uses CDs lol. Except hobbyists and collectors and certain very rare enterprise use cases. But that is expected with any legacy storage medium. You are just being intentionally deflective.
Next in, there are millions of floppy disks being sold every year, and that means floppy disks aren't outdated.
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u/bobertf Native Speaker 1d ago
maybe it’s an outdated practice, but that doesn’t mean the term for it is outdated. if you’re copying data to a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray today (not just CDs!), you’re burning to them.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 20h ago
if you’re copying data to a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray today (not just CDs!), you’re burning to them.
read what you wrote, but slowly
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u/bobertf Native Speaker 20h ago
gonna be honest I don’t see what was wrong with the statement. copying to an optical disc is burning.
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u/BigRocket44 Native Speaker 20h ago
Nothing is wrong with the statement, but what's interesting is that you used 'copying' to describe the action first, and then used it to describe what 'burning' is. Goes on to show that burning is an outdated term and the preferred term today is copying. You had to define what burning is using a more common, similar verb.
You could have said "burning is the act of copying stuff to an optical disk".
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u/SwordMasterShow New Poster 1d ago
Ripping the files from a CD you legally purchased isn't pirating. Distributing them could be, but if I want decent quality files to put on my phone instead of having to stream bad mp3s through a subscription service, I'm totally within my rights to do that
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u/Sure-Recognition-262 Native Speaker 1d ago
I think that is jurisdiction-dependent.
Here in the UK it's technically illegal but no-one is going to come after you for it.
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u/IRegretPostingAtAll New Poster 1d ago
This is so funny because a lot of younger Americans also wouldn't know! To burn a cd is to make a new cd from a blank one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_disc_authoring
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u/DootMcGee New Poster 1d ago
Is that true? Maybe its different in america but I think most younger adults and teens know what burning is, the same way most millennials know what a rotary phone is even if they've never actually needed to use one.
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u/IRegretPostingAtAll New Poster 1d ago
I haven't spoken to a person under the age of 25 in years. Young people scare and confuse me. But to be serious you're right they probably know the term but not how it works.
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u/FeetToHip Native (Midatlantic US) 1d ago
Knowing what a rotary phone is is more like knowing what a CD is. Knowing what "burn" means is more like knowing that you could dial *69 to call a number back, or dial 0 for the operator.
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u/Rogryg Native Speaker 1d ago
Just so people don't get it into their heads that there's any connection between *69 and rotary phones, *69 was introduced in the 90s, when rotary phones had already been obsolete for some time. Notably, features like *69 can't even be used on rotary phones, since they do not have "*" or "#" inputs.
Also, *69 didn't really stay in the public consciousness very long, because is was quickly supplanted by caller ID, especially since *69 was usually a paid feature, while caller ID was usually free.
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u/DootMcGee New Poster 1d ago
Maybe im an exception because I grew up on a lot of hand-me-down vhs, cassettes, and cds even in the late 00s abd early 10s. But I had no idea about the *69 thing, maybe because even my parents didn't get mobiles until like 2010 when smartphones were out.
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u/Kylynara New Poster 1d ago
I'm not sure if my kids (12 and 15) would know. It's not something that's really come up in the last decade, so they just might not have been exposed to the term. My kids had toy rotary phones as toddlers, but burning a CD/DVD, wouldn't have been something they'd have been exposed to.
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u/DootMcGee New Poster 1d ago
Oh I hadn't even thought of toys, that is interesting. And maybe I should have been more precise than "teenagers and young adults". I'm fairly confident the 18-25s (my bracket) would recognise the term, and thought at least a large portion of 13-18s would habe heard it, but wouldnt be surprised if under 13s hadn't.
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u/Kylynara New Poster 1d ago
We're all home from school now, so I asked them. The 15yo did know the 12yo did not.
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u/trampolinebears Native Speaker 1d ago
Make a hand gesture to suggest talking on the phone.
- Is your hand held flat, palm beside your cheek?
- Do you have your thumb and pinky extended to make a handset?
- Do you have one fist next to your ear and one below your mouth?
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u/Synaps4 Native Speaker 1d ago
The latest variant of this is holding your hand slightly cupped in front of your mouth, palm up.
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u/trampolinebears Native Speaker 1d ago
What, like you're on speakerphone to annoy everyone?
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u/frozenpandaman Native Speaker / USA 1d ago
And there was a program to do it called Nero.
Because it burned ROMs. (Referencing the legend of the emperor Nero burning Rome.)
Still the best named piece of software in history.
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u/34payton07 Native Speaker 1d ago
It’s a mostly outdated term used for copying the contents of a cd onto another.
- “Hey can you burn a CD for the road trip?”
- “Sure thing, I burned a mixtape of songs from iTunes.”
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u/typographie New Poster 1d ago
Writing data to an optical disc is often called "burning" a disc, probably because it is done by laser etching. The text is saying that they're making copies of albums for their friends.
You would use it for CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays, and (as far as I know) no other media. It's rare to hear it today, since most people aren't storing their own data on those formats anymore.
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u/tmahfan117 Native Speaker 1d ago
It is referring to “burning CDs”.
Thats how people used to copy music, they would get a blank or empty CD, and then put it in a disk drive that could copy the music to the CD.
This was called “burning” a CD because it was done by shooting a laser at the CD to physically heat the CD to alter it and store the music data.
CDs are “compact disks”, used to store music/information
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u/Successful_Life_1028 New Poster 1d ago
In early optical disks, you could only 'write once read many'.
So you were 'burning' that music to that disc, because once it was 'burned', you couldn't do anything else with that disc but listen to that music. (or otherwise read that data - in case it wasn't a music file!)
So creating copies of music tracks, typically without bothering with minor details like intellectual property laws or ASCAP licensing, was known as 'burning' music. Also known as 'pirating' music. Yo ho ho!
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u/SkinnyRunningDude Advanced 1d ago
To "burn" an optical media means writing data to it using a computer disc drive.
Data are literally burnt into the disc substrate by laser in the drive. For non-rewritable discs like the CD-R and DVD-R, it's a one-way, irreversible process.
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u/bloodectomy Native Speaker 1d ago
It refers to writing data to a compact disc (which is done via the CD drive's laser, hence "burn"). Before streaming music was a thing, burned CDs were the way to find new tunes.... assuming your friends bought different music than you, of course.
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u/Frosty-Froyo856 New Poster 1d ago
Write to a CD. It used a laser, and was referred to as “burning” the CD.
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u/Nexro378 New Poster 1d ago
When referring to burn here it means to move data from somewhere else into a CD in order to mass produce the data or just have it on the go such as Music or games.
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u/oceansstillwaters_ New Poster 1d ago
Looks like they mean burning mp3 files on a cd. I could be wrong
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u/Ritterbruder2 Native Speaker 1d ago
Data is written to CD’s by shooting a laser at it and etching grooves into the disk. The grooves represented data in the form of 1’s and 0’s. Almost literally “burning” it.
Most CD’s could only be burned once. You can read data from it as many times as you would like, but you cannot delete or add more data after it is burned.
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u/LexiTheLesbo New Poster 1d ago
You don’t heard it much today because the tech is a bit obsolete but ‘burning’ can mean storing data on physical media like DVDs or CDs. ‘Burning a copy’ in this context means that the kids were buying music and the copying the data onto CDs so they’re friends could access it without having to buy it themselves.
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u/AuggieNorth New Poster 1d ago
Burn is the word of choice for putting data on a CD or DVD, especially if it's music or video.
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u/experimental1212 New Poster 1d ago
Also note the tenses are all over the place, missing words, etc.
But that's how I actually talk as a native speaker because sometimes you don't know what you want to say when you start a sentence. Huge points off if you were to write that down in a written assignment for a grade, however.
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u/ebrum2010 Native Speaker - Eastern US 1d ago
To copy data to a writeable disc like a CD or DVD is called "burning," and copy data from one to a computer is called "ripping." It's tech jargon that was common around the turn of the millennium.
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u/Commercial-Print-967 New Poster 1d ago
Burning a CD is slang for recording new music over top of existing music, or just recording onto a blank
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u/CosetElement-Ape71 New Poster 1d ago
In this context "burning" is the act of writing music onto a blank cd.
We say we "burn" music onto a CD because a high-powered laser inside the computer's disc drive uses heat to physically alter a chemical dye layer on the blank disc.
The Laser: When you write data, a laser turns on and off rapidly to heat specific spots on the CD's recording layer.
The Permanent Change: The heat darkens or changes the phase of the organic dye, creating microscopic spots that mimic the pits and flat areas of a commercially pressed compact disc.
The Origin: Because the laser uses thermal energy to permanently "etch" or mark the data pattern into the disc's surface, the technical process was named burning.
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u/Apprehensive-Top3675 Native Speaker 16h ago
There's a good chance your native language uses the same term; you're just too young to know it.
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u/Nikotelec New Poster 1d ago edited 1d ago
Writing data to a cd is sometimes called "burning" it - usually in the context of music