WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. It is a set of agreed rules that let small devices — especially the mobile phones of the late 1990s and early 2000s, before smartphones — connect to the Internet over radio signals instead of a cable.

Because those old phones had tiny grey screens and slow connections, WAP pages were stripped down: mostly text, a few links, no real pictures. People talked about a 'WAP phone', 'a WAP site', or 'WAP-enabled'. In Taiwan and elsewhere it was how you checked stock prices or news on a Nokia.

You should know that this word is now historical. WAP was replaced by ordinary web browsing on 3G and 4G smartphones, and nobody sets up a WAP site today. You will meet the word in older textbooks, in exam vocabulary lists, and in company documents from that era. If a young person says WAP now, they almost certainly mean something else entirely — either a Wireless Access Point (the box in a café that gives out Wi-Fi), or the 2020 song by Cardi B, whose meaning is rude and not for the classroom.

It is pronounced as one word, like the English word 'wap', not spelled out letter by letter.