Newbie

History

The etymology of the term is uncertain. It may derive from "newie", which is attested in U.S. and Australian sources of the 1850s, meaning a neophyte in a place or situation; alternatively, it may derive from the British public school slang "new boy" or "new blood", which is attributed to the same era and was applied to a schoolboy in his first term.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "newbie" had a limited usage among U.S. troops in the Vietnam War as a slang term for a new man in a unit.

Another use of the term newbie was the moniker given to new U.S. Navy recruit students attending Basic Electricity and Electronics school by more senior students, a requisite course prior to enrollment in the A-school course at Naval Air Technical Training Center, Millington, Tennessee.

The earliest appearance of the term on the Internet may have been on the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre. By 1988, it had already entered online usage.

Coming from an oral tradition, the term has various spellings. Among alternative forms are "newby", "nubie", and "newbee" (e.g. Los Angeles Times of August 1985: "It had to do with newbees. I could be wrong on the spelling, but newbies are the rookies among the Blue Angels.").

In 2000, Electronic Arts released The Sims. The game featured a tutorial house with a family called The Newbies.

Connotations of variants

Different spellings can have quite different connotations; so in some contexts a "newb" refers to a beginner who is willing to learn,

Similar terms in other languages

• In Korean, the equivalent term is chobo or hasu, the opposite of gosu, meaning "highly skilled".
• In Chinese, cainiao (). It either originated from Hong Kong or from the Taiwanese army. It became an Internet slang term used in the Chinese-speaking community.

Notes

References

References

1. "MIT.edu". Web.mit.edu.
2. "LinuxQuestions.org". LinuxQuestions.org.
3. "Ubuntu Forums". Ubuntu Forums.
4. "[http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00323814 newbie] {{Webarchive. link. (March 27, 2020 " ''The Oxford English Dictionary'', 2nd ed., 1989, ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, (subscription needed) March 8, 2010.)
5. Entry for ''newbie'' in John Robert Elting, Ernest L. Deal, and Dan Cragg, ''A Dictionary of Soldier Talk'', New York: [[Charles Scribner's Sons. Scribner]], 1984, p. 209. {{ISBN. 0-684-17862-1
6. "Newbie". Lysator, the Academic Computer Society.
7. Dyker, Barbara. (May 31, 1988). "Re: some (should-be) ground-rules for submissions to comp.binaries.*".
8. Ericka Blye. (January 21, 2020). "The Sims: The Longest Existing Families". [[Webtoon (platform).
9. Broek, Anna Vander. (April 23, 2009). "Gamer Speak for Newbs". [[Forbes]].
10. 都市汉子. (July 4, 2005). "试论网络语言的基本特点上".