How “PWNED” went from hacker slang to the internet’s favorite taunt

Smack talk is an inescapable part of any kind of competitive activity. Whether you’re playing pick-up basketball or squadding up in Call of Duty: Warzone, there will most likely be someone trying to get under your skin by calling you a noob or worse.

But for a long time, the specific type of trash talk used in gamer communities pretty much stayed there. Then, massively popular games like League of Legends and Fortnite made online gaming into a mainstream hundred-billion-dollar industry, dragging those gamer terms into the spotlight, and there’s no word that better embodies how geeky jargon has made it into the mainstream better than “Pwned.”

The gamer slang is a misspelling of “owned” that has come to mean a person being totally and completely dominated by an opponent in any situation. If your trivia team loses by double digits, then you’ve been pwned just as badly as getting zero-to-death comboed in a match of Super Smash Bros.

“'Pwn' is a lot like the sense of 'own,' which means ‘to have power or mastery over (someone),’” the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains. “It has also been used to describe the act of gaining illegal access to something.”

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