ANORAKISH

Those choosing to wear that eminently practical cold-weather garment the anorak have suffered much opprobrium in Britain in the past couple of decades. It began with trainspotting, a specialised hobby involving much standing at the end of draughty station platforms noting down the numbers of passing engines. Those choosing this hobby were frequently ridiculed as being obsessive about trivia and as having poor social skills. Since trainspotters often wore anoraks, the word came to be a pejorative term describing such a person. From about the late eighties, it has come to refer to any person (almost always male) with an obsessive or excessively enthusiastic interest, particularly one involving the collection of supposedly trivial information or ephemera, and is often applied to someone immersed in some technological field, particularly computers or the Internet. The adjective anorakish has developed from this, as has the group noun anorakdom, the supposed disease anoraksia and the facetious word for a fear of all things techie, anoraknophobia.

World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2009. All rights reserved. Contact me if you want to reproduce this piece, but first see my advice page, which also has notes about linking. Your comments and corrections are welcome.