▪ oid
(Suffix, from "android") 1. Used as in mainstream
English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some
otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily
use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that
wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For
example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially
resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a "modemoid" might
be a 300-baud {modem} (Real Modems run at 144000 or up); a
"computeroid" might be any {bitty box}. The word "keyboid"
could be used to describe a {chiclet keyboard}, but would have
to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the
speaker's city of origin.
2. More specifically, an indicator for "resembling an android"
which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans
and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go
mainstream (most notably in the term "trendoid" for victims of
terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the
popularisation of the term {droid} in "Star Wars" and its
sequels.
Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for
at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have
probably been making "-oid" jargon for almost that long
[though GLS and ESR can personally confirm only that they were
already common in the mid-1970s].
[{Jargon File}]
(1999-07-10)