At the beginning of the 20th century, it was most likely that the insult used would be “bookworm” (or, for women, a?“bluestocking”).
Then in the 1930s and 1940s, thinkers were increasingly told that they lived in “ivory ?towers”, and by 1960, also had a decent chance of being labelled an “egghead”.
As the IT revolution, video game culture and personal computers took off in the 1980s, the obsessively cerebral were “geeks” or “nerds” –?although these are no?longer really serious terms of abuse.
“Boffin” has always remained a niche choice, but has enjoyed slow, steady growth since the middle of the century.
The results were ?created using the Google Ngram tool, which scours a vast corpus of books to?find how often different words are used.
