"And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” That typically nifty passage comes from Dr Seuss's “If I Ran the Zoo”. The book was published in 1950 and contains the first use of the word “nerd”... The precise meaning of the word (in its post-Seuss sense) is hard to pin down... It denotes a bundle of different qualities: “some combination of school success, interest in precision, unselfconsciousness, closeness to adults and interest in fantasy.”