Sunday, April 8, 2007

When Typos Become Slang

In the last month, I've come across the word "pwn" a couple times. Curious, I Googled it to find this explanation.

Urban dictionary defines Pwn as such:

1. An act of dominating an opponent.

2. Great, ingenious; applied to methods and objects.

Originally dates back to the days of WarCraft, when a map designer mispelled "Own" as "Pwn". What was originally supposed to be "player has been owned" was "player has been pwned".

Pwn eventually grew from there and is now used throughout the online world, especially in online games.

According to Wikipedia, "pwn" is also commonly referred to in the context of getting "pwned" by The Man.

It strikes me as interesting that one individual's slip of a finger on a keyboard in the game of Warcraft has managed to impact the English language. I guess it's just another example of how much technology influences the way we live today.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe you didn't know that, you Noob