A dongle is a piece of hardware that attaches to a computer in order to make a piece of secured software run. A dongle in this sense is used as a high-end form of security to prevent the unauthorized copying of software, since making a copy of the hardware itself is much more difficult than simply copying the software. The fairly absurd word seems to have been chosen more or less at random as a placeholder to describe the device when it was first used, and over time it was adopted as the actual name.
he primary use of a dongle today is in very expensive software, usually aimed at a small core market. Very expensive rendering and audio mixing software, for example, often makes use of a dongle to ensure that people don’t pirate the programs – which may cost many thousands of dollars for a single license. Computer Assisted Design (CAD) software is another area in which the use of a dongle is not uncommon.
