Bounty Hunter Archive
Thread: The end of the world!
A newbie is a newcomer to a particular field, the term being commonly used on the Internet, where it might refer to new, inexperienced, or ignorant users of a game, a newsgroup, the Internet itself, or an operating system.
Variant spellings, such as newb, noob or n00b, are common in Internet use.
Semantics
It can be both a disparaging and friendly term, always referring to a neophyte, or someone who behaves as such.
The word itself is likely a corruption of new boy; a new arrival in a school and who is, therefore, vulnerable to bullying of various kinds, such as hazing or fagging.
Newb and noob have somewhat different connotations. Newbs are simply newcomers - noob, on the other hand, generally means someone who is obnoxious, annoying, or breaks the rules; whether they are actual newcomers or not is mostly irrelevant. Therefore, a noob may be someone who has been around for a time but still engages in behavior that he should have learned is unacceptable. Noobs are generally confident in what they are doing, but in reality are annoying others. "Newb" is not necessarily an insulting word, but "noob" is.
"Noob" and its variants ("n00b", "naab", "noobo", "übern00b", "nUb", "nublet" "n44b etc.) can also mean a person who claims to know a lot about a subject but really does not. It was first used in hacker groups on the BBS chat systems in the 1970s. It is important to note that noob and newb are not necessarily interchangeable.
In online gaming, the term is also often used as a general insult. Frustrated players on the losing team may refer to the winning team as noobs. In this case there is no actual connotation of newness meant; the word is simply being used as an insult. By the same token, members of a dominating team may use the term "noobs" (n00bs) to further frustrate their opposition by implying a general lack of skill on the losing team's part, such as "camping" (staying at the same place all the time and using a one-hit-kill weapon all the time) or wastefully firing at a wall. Noob might also be used by veteran players to criticize cheap tactics or overusage of unbalanced weaponry. E.g., in an online team game where friendly fire is turned off, a noob "tactic" would be to overuse explosives in cramped areas around fellow teammates. Noob also specifically applies in games where team-play is important, and the players choose to completely ignore the team structure and goals.
Message Edited by bmill on 10-13-2005 02:25 PM
