Nerdom

noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The attitudes and behaviours of a nerd; nerdiness. colloquial, rare, uncountable

    "When she [Valerie Mahaffey] was 17 she fell in love with a schoolmate named Ben: 'Together, we pulled each other out of nerddom,' she said."

  2. 2
    Nerds considered as a group. colloquial, rare, uncountable

    "I still chuckle at some of [the] jokes that we targeted to very narrow slices of nerdom."

Synonyms

All synonyms
nerditudenerditude

Example

More examples

"When she [Valerie Mahaffey] was 17 she fell in love with a schoolmate named Ben: 'Together, we pulled each other out of nerddom,' she said."

Etymology

From nerd + -dom; attested in the USA from 1983. Note that -dom is used both in the sense of “domain” (nerds, as a group) and in the sense of “characteristics” (being a nerd, nerdiness).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.