When was the word nerd used for the first time

By the way, you almost never hear someone call a woman or a girl a dork. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Enjoy this article? Daven October 4, am. Flame March 3, pm. Ozzie Osbourne is a geek? Who knew? Wow, nice pic with this article! Bill in Houston March 14, pm. Nerd was popularized on the TV show Happy Days during the mids.

The image is just too perfect. But for now it remains just a wonderfully creative suggestion. One tantalizing aspect of the whole N. That might be coincidental, but it is interesting. The Well Travelled Nerd One of my many corespondents is Ben Zimmer, a writer for the Boston Globe who compiled a healthy list of citations of the appearance of the word "nerd" in print during the early 's. Such lowly "nerds" in other cities may on occasion be hailed by acquaintances, with, "Hey, nosebleed.

Cadet 1 Apr. Post 8 Feb. There's no better way to identify yourself as a nerd than by saying something is "George. Evening Gazette 22 Apr. Courier News 31 July 7 comic: "Freckles and His Friends" by Merrill Blosser Obviously this lad is considered a nerd bird -- a true cube, or slightly trapezoidical! Schmidt Some other time, nerd bird.

We can't dig that high-type gas you're handing us. The next documentation of the meaning of nerd is found in Glasgow, Scotland, where in the February 10, , issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail , the "ABC for Squares" column gave the definition as: "Nerd -- a square, any explanation needed? This gives us the following sightings of the term:. This is a very small number of data points, but it would tend to suggest that the term originated somewhere near Detroit and spread out from there.

So far, every appearance through of the slang term spells it nerd , and all but the original Dr. Seuss give it the meaning of "a square" — a dull or boring person. There is another reported instance from the 's that puts an interesting twist on the story…. According to one of my corespondents , From: "Diane" Subject: Nerd Date: Tue, 19 Sep [T]here was an alligator joke going around about or so.

The alligator was poking fun at a drunk who became quite indignant. So the drunk grabbed him and turned him inside out. It was funny in It may have been funny, especially in another, longer version , which ends, "'Knurd! The RPI Bachelor V14 1 It does, however, introduce us to a pair of alternate spellings, knurd and nurd , and to one of the putative origins of the term. Knurd Several people, largely RPI Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni have written me to insist, often quite forcefully, that the term nerd derives ultimately from knurd which is drunk spelled backwards, and that it was coined to differentiate the non-drinkers from the drunks.

To date, however, they have been able to supply very little in the way of documentation, but rather rely on long-standing oral tradition. The earliest RPI document that using any form of the word that I have seen so far is the back cover of the Homecoming, , edition of the RPI humor magazine, the Bachelor , shown here.

As can be seen the spelling at that point is nurd rather than knurd. Nurd This spelling is also reported in the American Heritage dictionary entry, quoting Current Slang , which was published by the University of South Dakota, as giving the following definition a few years after the Bachelor citation, in Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits….

An uninteresting person, a 'dud. Weeks Library at the University of South Dakota, they were able to provide 5 occurrences in and The AHD cited definition appears to be a combination of two of these. Nurd , n. Someone with objectionable habits or traits; an affected person. Undesirable person. The associations with obsessive technical expertise and fussy dressing remember nerd pack for a pocket protector? Compare and contrast geek , which once had similar links if you disregard the stories about biting the heads off live chickens in fairground booths but has largely been rehabilitated.

Nerds are thought to be obsessively good at one thing but poor at anything else. Nerds are geeks with no social skills. Nerds and Scurves: In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve. The Dr Seuss origin might be considered confirmed by these, but as you say, a shift from a work for young children to a fashionable teenager term is unlikely to have happened so quickly. Several other theories have been proposed.

In , the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen created a new addle-pated country-bumpkin dummy to accompany his suave top-hatted Charlie McCarthy and gave it the name Mortimer Snerd.

This source is dismissed by etymologists, but I have come across a few instances of somebody being nicknamed Snerd in the years before nerd was first recorded. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute usually gets a mention here, since there are persistent reports that the term was in use there in the s. Joyce Melton told me that the word has long had another meaning.