Geek

How to spell geek

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce geek

What does geek mean?

1. nounA person who is intensely knowledgeable about or devoted to a particular, often technical or niche, subject.
2. verbTo become very excited or absorbed in a niche interest, usually in the phrase 'geek out'.

Geek in a sentence

• noun

  Our resident computer geek rebuilt the entire office network over the weekend.

• verb

  The two engineers began to geek out over the new processor specifications.

• noun

  As a self-confessed history geek, he spends every holiday touring old battlefields.

• verb

  Give him a vintage camera and he will geek out about its lens for an hour.

Where does geek come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word traces back to geck, an old dialect term for a fool or simpleton that English shared with Low German and Dutch geck, meaning a fool or someone easily mocked. By the late 1800s the spelling geek had taken hold in American carnival slang, where it named a sideshow performer who did grotesque stunts for a crowd, a job nobody respected. Through the twentieth century the sense softened and shifted: a geek became a socially awkward or overly studious person, and then, by the late twentieth century, an enthusiastic expert, especially in computing or technical hobbies. Today the label is often worn with pride, so a person may happily call themselves a film geek or a maths geek. The spelling stays simple and phonetic, the only real question being whether to remember the double e, which it shares with relatives like geese and meek.

How the word is built

• geek (a single root from dialectal English geck: fool, simpleton)