Many laptops have a hotkey to toggle the wireless function on and off. Sometimes it shows an "airplane" symbol, more often a little mast with "signals" being transmitted from it. It's often one of the Fn keys, though the box I'm currently on has a separate row of touch-sensitive buttons above the physical keys. Some, usually older, boxes have a physical switch to turn wireless on and off.
In addition, some boxes are set up so that plugging in a wired connection automatically turns off wireless, commonly promoted as a power-saving feature. In most cases it is counterproductive to try to use a wired and a wireless connection at the same time.
The box I recently set up for my auntie had "airplane mode", brightness and volume controls on the Fn keys, all too easily caught. As a heavy user of those function keys, I found it a real pain to use.
Luckily, these things are commonly adjustable in the BIOS menus, accessible at start-up, so I rapidly adjusted things to normality, where it needed Function+F12 to turn WiFi off. The "power-saving" feature can also be adjusted on every box I've seen it on, either in the BIOS or from the operating system.
Windows also has its own "flight mode" toggle, tucked away in "Settings", "Network & Internet".
Incidentally, "WiFi" is a shortened form of "Wireless Fidelity", and is intended to show that the device can interoperate wirelessly with any other box with the same badge (using the term for a wired connection is just plain wrong, and leads to confusion).
In the early days, there were competing technologies; there still are, but every box needs to support a common standard, referred to as "802.11b", just in case.
"802.11a" was defined first and is faster, but "802.11b" was easier to implement, so became the must-have.