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Also seen as "noobie", "n00b", etc.
Etymonline gives an origin by 1969, possibly in the military. Is there a more definite origin anywhere? I know it is was also common on the Usenet, but of course any such use must have been post-1979 when Usenet was invented.
I know that the suffix "-bie" (as in freebie, etc.) is not uncommon, but I'm looking for specific usages of that suffix with the word "new".
Per comment, OED says "origin uncertain". Personally, my money's on it being a variant of...
newie - Chiefly U.S. and Austral. A person who is new to a place, situation, etc.; a newcomer; a novice.
1856 B. H. Hall Coll. College Words (rev. ed.) , Newy, at Princeton College, a fresh arrival.
1917 Truth (Sydney) 1 Apr. 6/7 Two newies had a rough-up at Rozelle.
1961 A. Berkman Singers' Gloss. Show Business Jargon 61 Newies (Var.), novices; neophytes.
Regardless of whether it was formed by b-insertion there (as with free = freebie), OED seems quite happy to say newbie is slang (orig. U.S. Mil.)., attested from the early 70s.
Its etymology is uncertain. It may derive from "newie", which is attested in U.S. and Australian sources of the 1850s and means a neophyte in a place or situation; alternatively, it may derive from the British public school slang "new boy" or "new blood", which is attributed to the same era and was applied to a schoolboy in his first term.
There was an episode of Highway Patrol that aired 4/14/58 where a delivery driver describes a waitress to Dan Matthews as a “newbie”. So it’s at least that old.
I can confirm the terms specific military usage going back at least to 1942, when the SeaBees were formed. In the US Navy if you are a member of the Construction Battalions you are referred to as a ‘SeaBee’. When someone is first transferred into the unit (enlisted or officer) they are referred to as being ‘NewBees’. Even experienced personnel who are transferred in from the fleet (sea going Navy) are referred to as NewBees. “The new Chief master at arms is a NewBee and needs to learn how things are done in the battalions.”
There was a reading club/program for american kids back in the 50's and 60's which involved a "noble order of bookworms". Acronyms like RADAR, NASA, and LASER were new and trendy back then, so noob could have easily come into being from the club name. There's not enough evidence available online to say that that actually happened at the time.
Old thread but, I think I remember something with Gee Bee air racing and how a new bee is the one to watch out for (keep an eye on) because they are inexperienced and the most likely to crash.
I first saw this word in 1988 on the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre, where it was explained to me that "newbie" was a recent coinage and a diminutive way to write "new-b", denoting in a pejorative way people who had recently joined the newsgroup, i.e., those who were "new to bizarre". The spelling "noob" was an alternative form. It was used heavily on that newsgroup but nowhere else that I encountered until years later. It seems possible and even likely to me that this was an independent reinvention of the word and the one that stuck.
new-be if bracketed that way is formally identical to Greek neo-phyton, insofar as the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *bʰuH- holds in either case.
The origin of phyton "child, growth", which should not concern us beyond the basic fact, might reflect PIE *bʰuH-tó (Wodtko et al., Lexikon der indogermanischen Nomina), maybe deverbal from phuo "to grow" (Wiktionary). The fact that Semitic בַּת, بِنْت etc. "daughter" or Sanskrit पुत्री for example are not related to this reconstructed root goes without saying.
Of course, the first question one has to ask pertains to attestation. Douglas Harper dates newbie "by 1969".
Second, word formation might offer a clue about stratification. Harper speaks of an ostensible diminutive suffix, which I have to guess has to be -y-, as Harper's refers further to noob and indicates Military Jargon. This is a bummer because troops are drafted from wherever. The only labial exponent that comes to mind is seen in knob, which has been compared to knave, Old Norse knapi, Dutch knaab, German Knabe etc. Other hypochorisms with -b- that couldn't be secondary (freebie) don't exist to my knowledge.
Third, comparative evidence from languages more closely related than Greek might help. Save for the existential paradigm to be, the cognates from this root seem to cover a lot of ground (op. cit.):
booth, through Old Norse
Old English būr "dwelling, house, store", Dutch bur "farmer", burlap "loin cloth".
Old Norse búi "dweller, inhabitant; neighbour; (law) a neighbour acting as a juror", nábúi "neighbour", whence Scottish Gaellic nàbaidh (Wiktionary).
beam, German Baum "tree", ...
et cetera
German Neubauer, is common as surname, same idea as Newman, Neugebauer, or toponymic New York. Is that it?
The labialization expected from English is enough to explain newie after assimilation from *neuvui. Whereas "b-insertion" (@FF) is not an actual thing (eg. Louis doesn't become lube).
However, since I'd bet that knave is akin to kind, gentle, genius, German Kind "child" etc., which derive from PIE *ǵenh₁- ~ *ǵn̥h₁-, it may be notable that laryngeals are theorized to have had a labial feature (Frederik Hartmann 2021, The phonetic value of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeal. In: Indo-European Linguistics).
In this case, fortition towards excrescent *-b might be a possibility.
