fanboy n.

a male fan (in later use chiefly of comics, film, music, or science fiction), esp. an obsessive one

Fancyclopedia


SF Fandom

  • 1919 Decatur (Illinois) Rev. 2 Oct. 6/2 page image

    It was a shock to the fan boys when Cincinnati…beat the Chicago White Sox.

  • 1982 Fandom Confidential No. 1 unpaginated (in figure)

    Just a couple of fanboys in bondage!

  • 1982 Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide (front cover)

    FAN BOYS FAN BOYS of America Inc. of America Inc.

  • 1996 SFX May 21/1

    Ten years ago, Tony Luke and I were simply a couple of fan-boy Hitchiker’s Guide fans going to cons and writing for fanzines.

  • 2000 Interzone Nov. 41/3

    Thus X-Men differs significantly from both the DC studio movies and the Dark Horse franchise in being principally put together neither by studio packagemakers nor by a production arm of the comics stable, but by a lone, crazed fanboy geek; and its evolution into the summer’s best big movie is down to a bizarrely unlikely accident of recombinant creativity, the rogue match of a really hardcore X-fan writer with a gifted, bankable director and a major-league producer with firsthand genre experience stretching back to the Superman cycle.

  • 2001 Interzone Apr. 63/1

    Now, fan-boy Fraser A. Sherman has catalogued an entire shopping mall full of the hard-skinned and the tasteless in his book Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan (McFarland, $45.95 or £36), a survey of American telefantasy films.

  • 2002 Science Fiction Chronicle May 26/1

    Science fiction invented the myth of the computer cowboy sitting in the blue light of a cathode-ray tube, romanticized it, made it attractive…yet the reality is much more banal, one of fanboys with more technical expertise than common ethics.

  • 2007 C. Stross Halting State (2008) 173 Charles Stross

    ‘What’s the con-convention?’ you ask, trying to sound only appropriately interested. Not that you know much about such things—you've done a few re-enactment events, but hotels and hucksters and hordes of socially inept fanboys don’t tempt you.

Research requirements

interdating 1919-1982
Earliest cite

1919 Decatur (Illinois) Rev. 2 Oct.
Research History
Jeff Prucher submitted two cites from 1982; one from a fanzine article by Jim Engel, "The Obligatory New Pages", and one from text drawn in the cover illustration by Bill Griffith for Jay Kennedy's "The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide".

The OED has a citation from 1919, and its next cite was from 1985. We would like further citations from between 1919 and 1982 as well as any citations antedating 1919.

Last modified 2020-12-16 04:08:47
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.