Many people map the HTTP verbs POST, GET, PUT, DELETE to Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD), which doesn’t really capture the semantics. So I found I like this analogy better:

Personally I am a fan of mapping the operations DELETE to cut, GET to copy, PUT to paste over, and POST to paste after. I know that others like to map the operations to the database CRUD model: POST to create, GET to retrieve, PUT to update, and DELETE to delete. It amounts to the same thing, except that the cut and paste view steers us more firmly away from record-based updates and into the world of freeform stuff to stuff and this to that data flows. Viewing the web as a document transfer system makes other architectures simpler, and makes them possible.

Not perfect, but certainly better.