On: Becoming Dr. Seuss

[smoyer]

Hey all you nerds ... always remember that it was Dr. Seuss who coined that term (who'd want to be called a geek their whole career?)

[RickJWagner → smoyer]

I thought 'nerd' originated with 'Happy Days'.

Was it really Dr. Suess?

[jklp → RickJWagner]

I doubted this too but a quick wikipedia search proved parent correct

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd#Etymology

[kbutler → jklp]

Digging a little deeper into Google N-Grams was enlightening in a different way:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nerd%2Cnerds&y...

There are lots of "nerd" occurrences before 1950!

However, looking a bit deeper:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22nerds%22&lr=lang_en&tbs=l...

These occurrences break down into a few categories:

- mis-recognition of "needs" or "herds", etc. - incorrect date assignment - possible foreign words

If you also found this interesting, I guess we both fit in Dr. Seuss's zoo.

[c0vfefe → kbutler]

That'll happen with most N-gram searches.