By Daryl Holmlund

You might be familiar with common acronyms used in internet slang, such as LOL for Laughing Out Loud or TTYL for Talk To You Later, but if you're a noob to online gaming you might be a little confused reading the messages that your teammates and opponents send to one another. Noob, for example, is short for newbie, which in turn is a nickname for someone who is new to gaming or to a certain gaming community. Another word, w00t (the zeros are pronounced as a regular "o" - wut ­- I don‘t have the capability on my computer to do phonetic symbols, but the u in wut there should have a flat line above it signaling it is a long vowel), is an acronym that stands for We Own Other Team and is commonly used exultantly after defeating another player or team.

There is, perhaps, no example of gaming slang quite as enigmatic as PWN. Of gaming slang, pwn has found the broadest audience and usage in popular culture. In 2006 it was used in the TV show South Park as well as the movie Employee of the Month. Among teenagers and college students, it can be found in the speech of non-gamers nearly as often in of gamers. But what does pwn really mean, and how is it pronounced?

Pwn usually refers to the domination of an opponent or the greatness of something or someone. Most often pwn functions verbally, as in, "Oh yeah, I just pwned that noob," or "Wow mom, this dinner pwns;" or to describe both domination and personal greatness: Tom pwns at WOW (World of Warcraft, an online game). It can also be found in the form of a noun as pwnage to refer to the devastating results of pwning or to a quality that exists in a truly great person or thing.

Pwn originated on early internet message boards as a common misspelling of own - which itself was used to show dominance over an opponent - because O and P are adjacent on the standard QWERTY keyboard. Somehow or other, pwn moved from typing error, to technical lingo. Because of this origin, many argue that pwn should be pronounced as own. For example, The popular web-based gaming TV show Pure Pwnage is officially pronounced Pure Ownage - however, pwn is also commonly pronounced as pone, pwone, or pawn, and there is little agreement among experts as to which pronunciation is proper. Opinions often differ based on age, or the specific online community within which one functions.

If one takes pwn to mean own, pwn becomes an example of leetspeak, an online language in which numbers, symbols, and other letters are used to replace letters to create a visual representation of words. For example, leetspeak is often seen as l33t - or the title of this webzine could be written as [0(V)4/V10/V$#1P.

The next time you get pwned you won’t have to act like a noob and ask what that means - you could probably even tell your opponent more about the word than he or she knows (or would ever care to know) and then you can respond with a big w00t when you get’em back a few minutes later.