Online gaming is replete with derogatory jargon to describe noobs. Newcomers to DayZ, a video game in which players struggle to survive a zombie apocalypse, are “bambis” because of the way they tend to wander around clueless and doe-eyed. In the popular role-playing game Destiny, players are known as guardians, and thus new players are dubbed “kinderguardians.” Noobs in fighting games are known as “button-mashers” for the way they furiously hammer their fingers into controllers without any understanding of the underlying game mechanics.

Unsurprisingly, 4chan, the self-proclaimed “internet hate machine,” has vulgar slurs for its noobs: “newfag” or “summerfag.” The latter denotes young users who only show up to the boards during the summer months, when school is out of session.

Despite its association with internet and gaming culture, people have been calling each other noobs, or some variant of the word, since well before the internet became mainstream. The New Hacker’s Dictionary, published in 1996, says the term “newbie” originates “from British public-school and military slang variant of ‘new boy,’” perhaps explaining the origin of the “b.” An analysis of the same term in Google books shows it being used sparingly during late 1800s, then dying off almost entirely until the mid-1980s, when it skyrocketed alongside the rise of Usenet and online communities.

It’s hard to pin down whether these early adopters intentionally meant to recycle the term or unknowingly reinvented it. Google Trends, which began recording data in 2004, shows that “newbie” remained the dominant identifier for novices online until around September 2005, when it was surpassed by the modern form. Interestingly, Google Trends bears no evidence for concurrent increases in transitional forms such as “newb” or “noobie,” both of which remained relatively rare but constant from 2004 to present. It seems “noob” lost its suffix and changed its spelling in two, nearly simultaneous linguistic mutations.

* * *

To be a noob is to occupy an odd transitional zone within a community. You are part of neither the ingroup nor the outgroup. Noobs are in a tryout phase; if they can learn the ropes, develop some skill, master the lingo, they may cross the threshold and attain the rank of acolyte or journeyman.

Identifying noobs, or “noob capture,” can be vital for maintaining the cohesion of a community, especially online. “It’s a way of preserving the integrity of the practices you’ve developed in a landscape where, on the face of it, your group looks no different that anyone else’s,” says Nancy Baym, an internet researcher who has been studying online interactions for decades. “You’re on the same platform, you’ve got the same template a lot of the time. The only thing really differentiating you is the ways that you communicate with one another.”