nerd
/nəːd
/(also nurd)
noun informal
1A foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious: I was a serious nerd until I discovered girls and cars...
- Devoid of social skills and eternally depressing, Pekar's voice speaks for nerds, social inadequates and all else on the margins of society.
- Recently we noticed some net nerds have been forming social clubs under the banner ‘Free Culture’.
- Most of the editors will readily admit to being any of the following: dorks, nerds, or geeks.
Synonyms
bore, dull person
informal dork, dweeb, geek
British informal anorak, spod
North American informal Poindexter
1.1A single-minded expert in a particular technical field: a computer nerd...
- So what does an under-the-weather computer nerd do to survive a sick day?
- A brilliant computer nerd overcame entrenched foes and now heads the firm.
- A self-confessed computer nerd, Schilling is the perfect pitcher for the digital age.
Derivatives
nerdish
- He lists the tasks awaiting him with a nerdish enthusiasm: ‘the process things about how you get regulatory approval’, he says - the tax considerations, the listing documents, court filings.
- These are the things that made him into not just a writer, but a functioning human being, no longer nerdish or obsessive, but alert - and honest - enough to reclaim and make sense of his younger, stranger self.
- What the average art-lover wants, though, especially from Edinburgh in August, is not nerdish information so much as a memorable visual experience, in this case superb pictures that will exhilarate and electrify.
nerdishness
- You get used to the opportunities to reinvent yourself as well - by the time I got to Perth, I had realised how easy it was to create my own backstory and circumvent the nerdishness and bullying of previous schools.
- Once, on a flight across America, I was guilty of a similar display of nerdishness when I looked down to see, and recognise, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
- No doubt we're supposed to think this is funny, and giggle about this guy's nerdishness behind his back, but he actually makes a lot of good points.
Origin
1950s (originally US): of unknown origin.
Originally an American term, nerd in the sense of ‘boring, unfashionable person’ was first recorded in 1951. The word itself appeared the previous year in If I Ran the Zoo by Dr Seuss, who seems to have invented it: ‘I'll sail to Ka-Tro / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!’ Some think that this is the origin of nerd, but Dr Seuss used the word in nonsense verse as the name of a kind of animal, and there is no connection with the obsessive computer fan we are familiar with. Another theory links the word with the name of Mortimer Snerd, a dummy used by the American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in the 1930s.