A to Z Blogging Challenge - N is for Nerd

No-one is really sure where the term 'nerd' came from. There are several possibilities to the origins of this word.

Dr Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo

The first appearance of the word 'nerd' is in the 1950 Dr Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo. The book talks about a boy who is bored with all the plain animals in his local menagerie and describes the wonderful, exotic creatures he would exhibit if he was head zookeeper. An example of these beasts is the fantastic Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, which is described as "the world's biggest bird from the island of Gwark, who eats only pine trees, and spits out the bark."
The word 'nerd' appears in the line:
And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo
And
Bring
Back
an IT-KUTCH
a PREEP
and a PROO
a NERKLE
a NERD
and a SEERSUCKER, too!

Newspapers

Only a year after the publication of the Dr Seuss book, 'nerd' started appearing in several American newspapers. However, this is probably not because of If I Ran the Zoo.

On October 8 1951, page eight of Newsweek, a weekly newspaper from New York that ran from 1933 to December 2012, reported:

In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve.

There are several other sources of newspapers with the word 'nerd' now with its current definition. By the 1950's,it is believed that this word had spread throughout America, an d eventually, the world.