Why is pwn own

This was around the same time as the rise of leet l33t speak , which is essentially Pig Latin for hackers h4x0r that wanted to secretly communicate in public message boards. Pwn didn't necessarily follow the rules of leetspeak, which is a system of modified spelling that replaces certain letters with numbers.

One famous example was the defacement of the Spice Girls website , which was hacked for several days that November as a statement against the mainstream adoption of the internet. Leetspeak and hacker jargon seeped into mainstream internet culture in the late s and early s.

That brought slang like n00b and pwn to a new generation of internet users and gamers that used these terms to taunt their opponents after a particularly flashy kill in a first-person shooter or fighting game. One example posted on Urban Dictionary in uses it as a non-gaming related flex.

That same year a mockumentary web series titled Pure Pwnage was created by a group of Canadian comedians. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here.

More from the IDG Network. Linux ignored, not immune, says hacker contest sponsor. If you play a lot of video games you probably say it yourself. And you may have been saying it for quite some time.

The word has been used in some pockets of the gaming world since the early years of this century, but it's increasingly making appearances in non-gaming contexts, where it typically sidles in with a decidedly informal, slangy tone:. Then, the Obama administration announced it would ease barriers on marijuana research, despite the Schedule I restriction.

Then, a bunch of federal attorneys general got pwned in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding their prosecution of medical marijuana businesses, which is a pretty big deal. Pwn is a lot like own , then, in the sense of 1b, "to have power or mastery over someone. The word likely has its origin in a mistyping of own , what with the p and o being so close to one another on the QWERTY keyboard and all. Like pwn , this sense of own has long covered territory also covered by the verb rout to communicate power or mastery in competition specifically.

That rout word is a busy one; see homograph 5, sense 1c: "to defeat decisively or disastrously. Here it has to do with hacking—that is, gaining illegal access—to something, such as a computer, or, as above, a car. For all the pwning going on, there's clearly a need for a noun to go with this verb.