Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun humorous Any intentionally nerdy style of music.
  • noun slang The most dedicated nerds, especially in terms of computer ability.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

nerd +‎ -core

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Examples

  • A largely white subgenre of hip-hop that celebrates the solitary pleasures of science fiction, computers and bad teenage movies, nerdcore is emerging from the shadows of the Internet, where it spent the last half-decade as an in-joke.

    New York Times Discovers Nerdcore » Fanboy.com 2007

  • I think there has to be a geeksta with all the growth nerdcore is having as a genre.

    EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson - Updated Geeks 2007

  • Some of the earliest MCs to find themselves classified as nerdcore actually self-identified as

    Hipster, please!: +1 blog of nerd music & culture 2009

  • July 31, 2009 at 1:01 AM wow, now i can write all my 16 bars nerdcore rhymes with ease, thanks wolfram

    Use Wolfram Alpha As A Writing Tool | Lifehacker Australia 2009

  • For many, this 9-song masterpiece was their first true taste of what would come to be called nerdcore, and this piece of our musical history can still be downloaded freely from YT's site.

    Hipster, please!: +1 blog of nerd music & culture 2009

  • Case, now 25, is an entrepreneur, a self-described "computer nerd" and one of the more prominent practitioners of a bustling little underground hip-hop scene called "nerdcore," a subgenre created by geeks for geeks.

    Geeksta Rap Rising 2007

  • See photos Also dubbed "nerdcore," this branch of hip-hop is for geeks, by geeks.

    Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore 2005

  • The term arose in the 40's to describe middle class whites acting like black musicians, now referred to as "nerdcore".

    Cracked: All Posts knifefish 2010

  • If, like the vast majority of music listeners, you're unfamiliar with the term "nerdcore," then you're in luck.

    /Film 2009

  • If, like the vast majority of music listeners, you're unfamiliar with the term "nerdcore," then you're in luck.

    /Film 2009

  • This was one of those gestures that historically carved out a little more space in hip-hop for wordiness for wordiness’s sake, from the experimental verbosities of Bahamadia or Busdriver or Milo to the Bulfinch-toting Ritalin oratory of Aesop Rock, who led the pack by miles in a 2014 token analysis of rapper vocabulary sizes; from the Sondheimian toniness of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton to this one tongue-in-retainer microgenre called nerdcore, where dudes put on exaggerated nasal voices to rhyme about Pentium chips and graphing calculators (MC Frontalot: The lecture I give with it when I rap a rhyme / To such a top condition (graphed improvement over time) / Would indicate my origin at age negative nine).

    On Rap’s Linguistic Twists and Turns Daniel Levin Becker 2022

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