The popular story says a moth in a Harvard relay in 1947 gave computing the word “bug.” The word is at least seventy years older than that moth.
Thomas Edison was using “bug” to describe technical faults in his own notebooks as early as 1878, and “debugging” had currency in aeronautics before it ever reached computing. In 1947, engineers on Harvard’s Mark II, Grace Hopper among them, found an actual moth causing a relay fault, taped it into their logbook, and labelled it the “first actual case of bug being found.” Hopper herself was explicit in later interviews that she wasn’t coining the term; the moth simply fit language that already existed, and her documentation and prominence in computing history are why the story became the one everyone tells.