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-oid

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-oid /suff./ [from `android'] 1. 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 box (Real Modems run at 9600 or up); a `computeroid' might be any bitty box. The word `keyboid' could be used to describe a chiclet keyboard, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. More specifically, an indicator for `resembling an android' which in the past has been 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 popularization of the term droid in "Star Wars" and its sequels. (See also windoid.)

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 I can personally confirm only that they were already common in the mid-1970s --ESR].

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