Where Does the Word “Nerd” Come From?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John Foonz. I’m calling from Waverly, New York.

Well, welcome to the show, John. What’s on your mind?

My mother was a character. She was, we all usually have somebody in our life that they have their own vocabulary. She’d have her own sayings, euphemisms, and words. And long before Ron Howard and Henry Winkler and Happy Days, she was calling us kids nerds. And I always thought that that was a word that she made up. But, of course, as a teenager, I tuned into Happy Days and pops out of Fonzie’s mouth. So I’m kind of wondering what you might have on that.

Okay, nerd. And so give me an idea. What decade are we talking about here when she would have used this?

This would have been the early 70s.

Okay, good. Well, I was just wondering if she was like on the cusp of the early slang use for this. But it sounds like she was just a little past it.

So nerd meaning?

Yeah, what did she mean?

I don’t remember if she specifically, you know, what we know is a nerd today. I don’t remember the context. I was much too young, but I just remember her calling us it.

So it wasn’t like you nerds clean up your room or you nerds, you don’t know anything? Are you nerds?

Oh, John, stop being a nerd.

Yeah. You’re not wearing that outside this house, nerd.

Well, not so threatening, but yeah.

No, okay. But nerd meaning somebody who’s unfashionable or uncool dates back to early 1950s. The earliest print use that we have is 1951. But there’s an asterisk to that is that in 1950, the word nerd is used in a Dr. Seuss book. We don’t know word researchers and etymologists if Dr. Seuss is the origin of the slang nerd. We just don’t know. The line in the book is something like, then just to show them I’ll sail to Couture and bring back an Ichkatch, a Preep and a Prue, a Nercolan nerd, and a seersucker too. And we really just don’t know. This is If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss from 1950.

So it’s weird that a word from a kid’s book would show up in teen slang.

It wouldn’t be impossible. And it’s very interesting that that’s 1950 and then nerd shows up in 1951. Maybe teenagers read to their younger siblings. Who knows?

Yeah, or they were exposed to the word, and as they got older, it just became part of their vocabulary, maybe.

Well, maybe, but again, there’s like a one-year gap from when the word appears in print in Dr. Seuss and then starts being used as teen slang.

Huh.

Yeah, yeah. One other theory is that it’s from drunk backwards, but there’s just no evidence really to support that, except that it kind of looks like it.

Silent K.

Okay. Yeah, I think when I first heard that word, I pictured it with a U rather than an E. There is a word called a nurdle, which is used for if you put the kind of wavy drop of toothpaste you put in a toothbrush. It’s called a nurdle. Or little blips of styrofoam that are used for packing material are sometimes called nurdles. So some people have tried to connect those, but nurdle tends to be much later. So it sounds like your mom was right there in the mix.

Did she read Dr. Seuss to you as a kid?

She read, but it was never Dr. Seuss. It was always poetry stuff.

Do you think of yourself as a nerd now?

In many ways, yes. I mean, I went through my teenagers, big fan of big bad music. I am a huge word nerd, grammar nerd, punctuation nerd. So in a lot of ways I am, and in a lot of ways I’m not.

Yeah, well, this is a safe space for nerds.

I know. Nerds have taken over already.

Yeah. Anyway, John, that’s what we know about nerd. Thank you for joining us, nerds. I really appreciate your help out of it.

Thank you very much, and it was a pleasure being on the show.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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