(bolding mine)
…snrrrrrrrk.
Generally, yes.
Damn.
Double damn.
I re-read that post, what, two times before posting?
Years ago my friends and I would say ‘Ya bloody poon!’ But then I started working with a woman whose surname was Poon.
I strongly doubt it. It more than likely arose from the time when deathmatch FPS was the king of online play, in the days of Quake 1 and 2. Games were very fast-paced, and you usually only had a few spare seconds to type out a quick text message to the guy you just fragged. It’s very likely that many people, attempting to stab out a quick ‘owned!’ flubbed it and came out with ‘pwned!’. You certainly never had time to proofread what you were typing.
Yeah typos become part of the vocab. Back when I played EQ everybody knew PPM stood for Out-Of-Mana (I never saw it used intentionally, but that’s a real common accident).
There is a wikipedia entry on the word, for those who are interested.
You can find it here.
It definitely predates World of Warcraft by some years, since I recall it being in common usage in EQ years before WoW’s release.
It’s almost certainly a typo of “own” since in a good many FPS (and other pvp games or games with pvp elements), “own” is vernacular for “killed you in a particularly embarassing fashion/without any difficulty whatsoever” and has been for as long as I’ve been playing those sorts of games. So at least 12 years.
ETA: I’ve always heard it pronounced (when I’ve heard it pronounced aloud) as “pone”.
My World of Warcraft contacts told me, when I asked the same thing, that it originated as “power-owned”, kinda like a superlative to “I owned that mofo!” The people who told me this have been known to play for 14 hours straight, so they are somewhat reliable on that topic.
Oh, and ChiefScott, “some sort of shat function”? Teh. Best. Typo. Evar.
Nono, not WoW:
I don’t have any citation to back me up, but while I don’t believe it came from the original Warcraft RTS, that’s certainly an old enough game to have been popular during the word’s inception.
And the ‘power-owned’ explanation is a complete load of after-the-fact hooey IMO. I strongly suspect the word would have emerged some other way were that the primary meaning, likely as powned or p-owned or some such.
I never use it, and I mentally subtract about 30 IQ points from my evaluation of anyone I come across on the internet who uses ‘pwn’ in a sentence. Either that, or I assume they are twelve years old.
Leet speak is a perfect example of a joke that was funny for about the first dozen times it was ever used, and after that just became increasingly tedious.
What kind of a name is “Poon,” anyway?
Huh. I would have never knpwn. Boy do I feel like a clpwn.
Commanche Indian.
So, it wasn’t named after a certain bad-ass Marine Sergeant on LV-426?
No no no. Not WoW. Warcraft. The first Warcraft. Orcs vs. humans and whatnot. It came out in 1994, easily early enough to be the origin of the word.
That bullshit stinks to high heaven. And Ogre, most online gaming communities are going to claim to have invented “pwn” and any number of other conventions if pressed. bufftabby, your WoW friends are full of shit. “pwn” has been around a lot longer than WoW has.
Are you seriously suggesting that the original users of “pwn” claimed it was the correct spelling? Are you sure?
I hate to rain on your parade even more, but “leet” hasn’t been very cool for almost 10 years–any usage since then has mostly been either ironic, frowned upon, or both. I would also argue that “pwn” has a tenuous connection to leet, at best.
Look up two posts. NOT World Of Warcraft. The 1994 Warcraft. The first one.
You mean Apone?
Nice…except it’s Comanche with one M. 
Using my newfound knowledge gained from this thread, I’m more apt to believe the “typo” origin of ‘pwn’ vice the retconned-sounding “Powerfully Owned” origin.
And I’m considering using the ‘poon’ pronounciation if only to get me some sweet “pwntang” from MrsChief!