Did a title search on this 'un, to no avail.
Can someone try to etymologically explain this word to me?
I get it’s usage – “I totally pwned (pwn’d?) you!” he declared after crushing his father at Super Smash Bros.
I believe it comes from the slang usage of “own” as in “I beat you so bad I now own you!”
Where’d the “p” come from? Is it pronounced “Pone” or “Own”? Has “pwn” been defined? Was this word coined by the on-line/gamer/texting community? Is it right for a 14-year-old kid to say he “pwned” his old man?
pwn and teh are common mispellings in game chats that sort of took on a life of their own. It is a (now deliberate) misspelling of ‘own’ as you thought. (See you are kewlr than you thought)
As for how you pronounce it i believe originally you still said ‘own’. The 'pwn" is sort of a ret-conned l33t usage that is meant to be typed.
Now of course everyone tries to pronounce it someway and every way is different.
I believe I’m of above-average intelligence and relatively well-educated. But the above statement might as well be written in Aramaic. I don’t know what it means.
I have a vague memory of poker player Phil Hellmuth claiming he invented “pwn” while playing online, but a cursory Google doesn’t turn up the claim. I can’t check specific poker sites from work, though.
Retroactive continuity (or informally retcon) is the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. The change itself is informally referred to as a “retcon”, and the act of writing and publishing a retcon is called “retconning”.
Leet (written 31337, 1337, L337, 1337r0z, 13370rz, and l33t), or Leetspeak, is a written argot used primarily on the Internet, which uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. The term is derived from the word “elite”, and the usage it describes is a specialized form of symbolic writing. Different dialects of leet are found on different online forums.
In other words, it was a mistake that people who couldn’t type claimed was correct, and eventually became accepted as such.
I say ‘pone’. Well, I don’t say it, but I mentally pronounce it. I have geekier friends who will say it out loud, and pronounce it ‘poon’, and I giggle.
[retcon]Me, I say “pawned”; a pawn is the most pathetic and weak chess piece, thus if you “pawned” someone they automatically are considered to be the lowest ranking and wimpiest peon in the game in question.[/retcon]
The other meaning of “pawn” that might be in the background of the meaning of “pwn” is to pledge an item as security for a loan, i.e., deposit an item of value at a pawnbroker in exchange for a loan. If you don’t repay the loan with interest, the pawnbroker gets to own the item.
I use the Welsh pronunciation for the “w”, thereby rendering it as “poon”.
Of course, I only say it to mock leet-speakers, so the sillier pronunciation is better. This works best if the term is surrounded by posh pseudo-British verbiage. “I say, old chap, I do believe that I have pwned you, as it were.”
Wait wait wait. I’ve heard it claimed for years that “pwn” originated as a typo in the first Warcraft, and that it took off from there. Cn anyone confirm or deny?