No it's not stupid - your etymology makes much less sense to me. DOM in virtual DOM refers to the tree that browsers use internally and provide an API against, not just any tree like structure that can be serialized to HTML (which seems to be your definition). That's why it's referred to as "the DOM" with a definite article. The "virtual" part then means something like "shadow" as in a copy that is kept in sync. By that definition you didn't create a "virtual DOM". What is your definition of "virtual", "DOM" and "virtual DOM"?