[from Greek suffix -oid = `in the image
of'] 1. Used as in mainstream slang 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 box (Real Modems run at 28.8 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 popularization of the term droid in
"Star Wars" and its sequels. (See also windoid.)
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 I can personally confirm only that they were
already common in the mid-1970s --ESR].
