'HTTP' originates from English, specifically the phrase 'HyperText Transfer Protocol', where 'hyper-' derives from Greek 'hyper' meaning 'over' or 'beyond', 'text' comes from Latin 'textus' meaning 'that which is woven' (i.e., written material), 'transfer' comes from Latin 'transferre' meaning 'to carry across', and 'protocol' comes from Greek 'protokollon' via Latin/Old French meaning 'first glued leaf' (i.e., official record).

'Hypertext' was coined in the 1960s (credited to Ted Nelson) to describe non-linear linked text; 'protocol' entered English via Medieval/Modern Latin and French. The initialism 'HTTP' was introduced in the early 1990s alongside the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee, to name the protocol used to transfer hypertext documents between web servers and clients.

Initially it referred specifically to the simple, early protocol for fetching raw hypertext documents (early HTTP versions such as 0.9). Over time it evolved to denote a family of protocol versions (HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3) and more generally the method and conventions for web data transfer; it also commonly denotes the URL scheme 'http://'.