Deskjet, Inkjet, Bubblejet, etc…
What does the “jet” part of the name mean?
Thanks.
It refers to the fact that the ink is “shot” out of some sort of nozzle onto the paper. The “business” part of the print head doesn’t make contact with the paper, as it did with dot matrix or daisy wheel printers (anyone old enough to remember those?!).
A jet of ink is sprayed onto the paper.
Thanks.
And yes Early Out, I have used Dot Matrix printers. Not sure about daisy wheel printers however. Maybe.
Used daisywheels (Diablos) and dot-matrices (heck, even TTY keyboard+printer units) in my time.
“inkjet” is used as the common term, with the other “-jets” being trademarks of the particular maker of the printer or of the print system (Deskjet=HP, Bubblejet=Canon).
To add some extra info here, the most usual methods to eject the ink out of the nozzle are a small resistor heats up and vaporizes the ink forming a tiny bubble that pops and send the ink particles out of the nozzle. The advange of this method is that print heads are relatively cheap, but the resistors burn rather frequently.
The other method uses piezoelectric elements to “kick” the ink out, a piezoelectric element being an electronic thingy (how´s that for tech talk, huh?) that contracts or expands when a voltage is applied; it´s more expensive but outlasts the bubble type by quite a bit of a margin.
For example, Lexmark uses bubblejet on it´s cartdriges, and if you have any experience with the things nozzles start to fail soon (if you refill them, anyway), on the other hand the piezoelectric print head on my Epson prints as good today as when I bought it 8 years ago.
As a side note, I´ve worked on a printing shop where there were three different types of wide media printers, and it´s quite amazing to see even though the print heads (the size of a 17" monitor on the big printer) glide back and forth a good centimeter above the media surface the printer spits all those little dots with very good accuracy.
The “Jet” name is commonly associated with Hewlett-Packard, who make things like LaserJets that don’t use any kind of “jet” technology, but it makes the product sound “kewl” and fast. 
The first H-P “Jet” I encountered was the ThinkJet dot-matrix inkjet. Not a real big seller, it was limited to 8.5 inches wide, required pin-feed paper, and looked blurry unless you shelled out extra bucks for the special H-P paper. But it was quieter than the old impact-style dot matrix printers and daisywheels.
Actually, now that I think about it, in about 1988 or so when I was a freshman in high school, I took a typing class for one semester, and used a daisywheel typewriter.
Have you recovered all of your hearing, yet? In the back of my mind, I can still hear the staccato rat-a-tat of a daisywheel printer! 
WHAT???
Oh, and in case my joke didn’t translate well into print, that’s supposed to be me pretending to be deaf
And what about the rest of us that learned on the thunk-thunk-clack-thunk-clack-thunk-thunk of IBM Selectrics?
As **SavageNarce ** said, “jet” in the name makes it sound zippy and fast and all that. HP was first at it with the ThinkJet and DeskJet - with an Apple interface, the same printer was a DeskWriter. AFAIK, HP didn’t make the Apple LaserWriters. Sweet Jeebus, those things were huge and heavy! At least they were easy to upgrade - just swap out the foot-square or so main board and stick on the “NTX” badge.