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Wannabee

Definition: Wannabee

Wannabee

Noun

1. An ambitious and aspiring young person; "a lofty aspirant"; "two executive hopefuls joined the firm"; "the audience was full of Madonna wannabes".

Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
 


Specialty Definitions: Wannabee

DomainDefinitions

Computing

Wannabee /won'*-bee/ n. (also, more plausibly, spelled `wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] A would-be hacker. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering larval stage, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or suit, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the wannabee nature. Compare newbie. Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in larval stage, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture -- communities formed spontaneously around people who, _as individuals_, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out to _be hackers_ and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one. Source: Jargon File.

Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Synonyms: Wannabee

Synonyms: aspirant (n), aspirer (n), hopeful (n), wannabe (n). (additional references)

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Crosswords: Wannabee

Specialty definitions using "wannabee": munchkinReading Habitsterminal junkie. (references)

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Usage Frequency: Wannabee

"Wannabee" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 100.00% of the time. "Wannabee" is used about 3 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted)
Parts of SpeechPercentUsage per
100 Million Words
Rank in English
Noun (singular)100%3202,518

Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.

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Frequency of Internet Keywords: Wannabee

The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com.
 
ExpressionFrequency
per Day

  wannabee

3
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Anagrams: Wannabee

Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams

Words within the letters "a-a-b-e-e-n-n-w"

-1 letter: wannabe.

-3 letters: benne, bwana, nawab.

-4 letters: anew, anna, awee, bane, bean, been, bene, naan, nabe, nana, nene, wane, wean, ween.

-5 letters: aba, ana, ane, awa, awe, awn, baa, ban, bee, ben, ewe, nab, nae, nan, naw, neb, nee, new, wab, wae, wan, web, wee, wen.

 Words containing the letters "a-a-b-e-e-n-n-w"
 

+4 letters: unanswerable.

Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Alternative Orthography: Wannabee


Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)

57 61 6E 6E 61 62 65 65

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)

American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)

=

Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)

Braille (1829, in France) (references)

Morse Code (1836) (references)

.--.    .-    -.    -.    .-    -...    .    .

Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)

Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)

01010111 01100001 01101110 01101110 01100001 01100010 01100101 01100101

HTML Code (1990) (references)

&#87 &#97 &#110 &#110 &#97 &#98 &#101 &#101

ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)

0057 0061 006E 006E 0061 0062 0065 0065

British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)

Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)

5767808067687171

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INDEX

1. Definition
2. Synonyms
3. Crosswords
4. Usage Frequency
5. Expressions: Internet
6. Anagrams
7. Orthography
8. Bibliography


  

Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.