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Newbie is a slang term for a newcomer to online gaming or an Internet activity. It can also be used for any other activity in whose context a somewhat clueless newcomer could exist. It can have derogatory connotations, but is also often used for descriptive purposes only, without a value judgment.
History
The word newbie is a variant of 'new boy' and comes from British public school and military slang. In the 1960s the term "newbie" also had a limited usage among U.S. troops in the Vietnam War as a slang term for a new man in a unit. Its earliest known usage on the Internet may have been on the USENET newsgroup talk.bizarre. In any case, the term is believed to have entered online usage by 1981.
Variants
Coming from an oral tradition, the term has variant spellings, including "newbee" (e.g. Los Angeles Times of August 1985: "It had to do with newbees. I could be wrong on the spelling, but newbees are the rookies among the Blue Angels...").
In internet usage the full spelling of "newbie" has not been used so widely - often it has been shorten into other forms. A common variant is "n00b" or "noob", and is used as a pejorative for a user who fails to learn from experience, or in some cases, to degradingly refer to users who disrupt other users. Other spellings include "newb", "nub", "nooblet", "n00blet","newb" or any version of these written in Leet.
See also
- FNG, another term for someone new to a unit used in the Vietnam War.
- Newbie is the surname of a fictional family in The Sims computer game series.
References
- Entry for newbie in John Robert Elting, Ernest L. Deal, and Dan Cragg, A Dictionary of Soldier Talk (New York: Scribner, 1984), 209. ISBN 0684178621
- http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/newbie.html
- Post to comp.sys.mac in 1988