Software is all the programs a computer runs — the part you cannot touch. Install software, software update, a piece of software.
It is uncountable, so you have a piece of software rather than a software, which learners get wrong constantly. It is expensive to write and costs nothing to copy, which is why the industry is shaped as it is. Note that the word was coined in 1958 as the counterpart of hardware.
1nounsoftwareThe programs a computer runs.
“You'll need to install the latest software before the printer will work.”
software is computer programs.
Soft plus -ware, coined by John Tukey in 1958 by contrast with hardware.
Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
Middle English
softe
English
soft
English, today
software
Built from
From soft + -ware. Computing sense from soft + -ware, by contrast with hardware (“the computer itself”). coined by John Tukey in 1958. The earlier sense of software to mean tangible products with a soft texture may have fallen out of common usage before the computing sense was created. soft comes from Middle English softe. From Middle English softe, from Old English sōfte, alteration of earlier sēfte (“soft”), from Proto-West Germanic samft(ī) (“level, even, smooth, soft, gentle”) (compare sōmiz (“agreeable, fitting”)), from Proto-Indo-European semptio-, semtio-, from sem- (“one, whole”). Cognate with West Frisian sêft (“gentle; soft”), Dutch zacht (“soft”), German Low German sacht (“soft”), German sanft (“soft, yielding”), Old Norse sœmr (“agreeable, fitting”), samr (“same”). More at seem, same.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA