nerd-snipe

English

Alternative forms

• nerd snipe, nerdsnipe

Etymology

nerd +‎ snipe. Coined by American cartoonist, author and engineer Randall Munroe in 2007 in his webcomic xkcd.

Verb

nerd-snipe (third-person singular simple present nerd-snipes, present participle nerd-sniping, simple past and past participle nerd-sniped)

1. (slang) To present someone with a very interesting problem to solve, distracting them from whatever they were doing previously.
   • 2022, Luca Palmieri, Zero to Production In Rust: An introduction to backend development in Rust, →ISBN, page 330:

     […] I am looking forward to revising this chapter when better tooling becomes available (or I get nerd-sniped into writing it).

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:nerd-snipe.

Related terms

• nerd-sniper