Newbie

A newbie (also spelled noob, newb, or n00b in the leetspeak of internet culture) is a newcomer to a particular field, the term being commonly used on the internet, where it might refer to new users of a game, a newsgroup, the World Wide Web itself, or an operating system.

It can be both a disparaging and friendly term, always referring to a neophyte, or someone who behaves as such. The word itself is likely a corruption of new boy; a new arrival in a school and who is, therefore, vulnerable to bullying of various kinds. On Google's Usenet archive, the word first appears in 1988 [1]. The term was used prior to this as slang in the U.S. Military to denote men who had finished technical school and were just arriving to their first permanent assignment.

The words newbie and n00b are sometimes differentiated. If they are, a newbie is someone who follows all protocols and essentially acts like an established user but still in the process of learning, while a n00b is an obnoxious person who has not even considered that they might be irritating others. A stereotype is that they all type in Internet shorthand, which is sometimes known as "AOLer" or "AOL-speak."

There are numerous spelling variations, usually substituting different letters for the vowel sounds and dropping the second syllable (newb, noob, nub). Different spellings may carry different connotations within a particular community, but in general the spelling does not affect the meaning. In practice, differences in interpretation tend to depend more on context than on spelling.