Nerd

How to spell nerd

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nerd

What does nerd mean?

1. nounA person who is intensely or single-mindedly devoted to intellectual or technical interests, often seen as socially awkward.

Nerd in a sentence

• He is a self-confessed computer nerd who builds his own machines.

• Every office has one history nerd who can date any old photograph.

Where does nerd come from?

Language of origin: Other

The first printed appearance of nerd is in Dr. Seuss's 1950 children's book 'If I Ran the Zoo', where it names an imaginary creature the narrator would collect, though Seuss almost certainly did not intend the modern meaning. Within a year or two the word had escaped into American teenage slang, where it described a dull, socially awkward, or studious person. The true origin before Seuss is genuinely uncertain, and several proposals compete: some link it to 'nert', a 1940s variant of 'nut' meaning a crazy person, while others suggest it was simply coined as nonsense. By the 1970s and 1980s the sense narrowed toward someone obsessively devoted to intellectual or technical pursuits, and the connotation gradually softened into something almost affectionate. Because it is a short, phonetically regular word, the only real spelling point is remembering it ends in the same '-erd' pattern as 'herd' rather than '-urd'.

How the word is built

• nerd (single root; no prefix or suffix)