 Then the whole town will ask why this boy never sleeps, no keeper before ever kept what he keeps. There's no telling what that young fellow will do. And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Catru, and bring back an it-cuch, a preep, and a pru, a nercle, a nerd, and a seersucker too. This is the first ever instance of the word nerd in the English language in the 1950 Dr. Seuss book, If I Ran the Zoo. But as you can see, there are six other made-up words on that page alone, and none of them want on to be particularly widely used, so Dr. Seuss probably isn't responsible for popularizing the term. Especially considering this fellow here doesn't bear any obvious resemblance to our modern idea of the nerd. A better candidate for the first real instance of the word nerd comes just one year later in an issue of Newsweek, which reads, Here we see it used in a much more familiar sense, but still not quite the way most of us understand it. Other examples of the word come soon after, and a lot of them compare the word nerd to the word square. So let's talk about the word square for a second. There's a popular etymology of the word square that claims that it originally referenced the way a conductor's hands move when they conduct a regular 4-4 beat. That origin may or may not be true, but at any rate, the word square really did come from jazz culture, where at first it referred mostly to people who didn't appreciate jazz, but it wound up being expanded to mean traditional, conservative, and close-minded. It seems like in the 1950s when it was first becoming popular, the word nerd was used more or less the same way, as a way for jazz musicians and beatniks to describe the more mainstream culture and institutions that looked down on them. It didn't mean introverted or bad at socializing, or smart, or obsessed with some subject, or even necessarily unpopular. All it really meant was traditional and boring. It wasn't until around 1960 that people started using the word nerd to mean roughly what we think of today. Now, there's an argument to be made that the idea of the nerd is much older than that. The term greasy grind had been used since the 1800s to describe students who focused on academics to the exclusion of extracurricular activities or making friends. Likewise, something we could easily call nerd culture is also pretty old. But it wasn't until the early 60s that the word nerd really became associated with the modern nerd stereotype. People with poor fashion sense, poor social skills, and uncommon interests, people whose obsession with the minutia of some topic made them boring to be around. I've read reports of it being used like this as early as 1959, but it seems to me like it took until the 70s to really become mainstream. At this point, Fonzie from Happy Days was regularly using it, and the SNL skit, the nerds, also probably helped popularize it around the same time. But then, just as the word was peaking in popularity, its meaning started to shift for a second time. I found it difficult to pin down exactly when and how this happened, but I'd say that the 80s and 90s comprise a sort of transition period during which the term nerd became less and less derogatory. It still wasn't exactly cool to be a nerd, but in TV and movies from the time, nerds increasingly became the protagonists rather than just comic relief. The obvious example of this is Revenge of the Nerds. In this movie, we're still supposed to laugh at the main characters for being so nerdy, but we're also supposed to root for them and to think that their treatment is unjust. Also, quick tangent, it wasn't until this period that the term geek comes into the picture. See, originally, the two words geek and nerd weren't just different, they were complete opposites. While nerd referred to people who were boringly conventional, geek was a synonym for freak, to the extent that circuses would literally advertise their geek pits the same way they'd advertise a freak show. So when in the 1980s people started using the phrase computer geek to describe people who were really interested in computers, it would have sounded to them basically the same as computer freak. But at that point, since the stereotypes surrounding people who were really into computers were basically the same as the nerd stereotype, it was kind of inevitable for the two words to start converging. There are still people who insist there's an important difference, but I'd argue that at this point the two are basically interchangeable. Anyway, on the other end of this transition period, the term nerd had gone through a radical shifted meaning. At least as early as the 1990s, certain social groups were describing themselves as nerds, and especially after the dot-com boom, people started wearing the term nerd as a badge of honor. It kind of looks like once the word nerd became seen as a subculture rather than just the boring mainstream, it started seeming kind of cool and rebellious. Look at the way the characters in Big Bang Theory treat the word nerd. You can't do that. Look what you've created here. It's like nerdvana. I mean, aw, like she didn't know we were nerds. They use it to just matter-of-factly describe certain types of interests, particularly having to do with science and technology and science fiction. Compare that to the way in the 1970s, the characters in Happy Days hate the prospect of being labeled nerds. Because we belong to chess club, because we belong to cam club, because we happen to be wearing matching jackets. Well, it's terrible. It's a nerd party. Yeah, who won? He's not important. Sometime between the two, the term not only lost its sting, but became a proud self-description, broadening to anyone who's deeply enthusiastic and knowledgeable about something. Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't think in my lifetime I've ever heard someone sincerely use the word nerd as an insult. From my point of view, someone who did so would be woefully behind the times and embarrassingly unfamiliar with modern language use and culture in general. In other words, they'd be a bit of a square.