-oid

jargon (from "android") A suffix used as in mainstream

English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some

otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily

use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that

wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For

example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially

resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a "modemoid" might

be a 300-baud modem (Real Modems run at 144000 or up); a

"computeroid" might be any bitty box.

"-oid" can also mean "resembling an android", which was once

confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has

recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in

the term "trendoid" for victims of terminal hipness). This is

probably traceable to the popularisation of the term droid

in "Star Wars" and its sequels.

Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for

at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have

probably been making "-oid" jargon for almost that long

(though GLS and ESR can personally confirm only that they

were already common in the mid-1970s).

[Jargon File]

(1999-07-10)