Means: To be defeated at something, made a fool of or dominated in some way.

Usage: “Ha ha, Miss Brown pwned you, Chris”

While Yoofspeak has so far walked slang’s spoken path, in these technology-driven times the written word has quirks all of its own. One of the geekiest is the mis-spelling of “owned”, said to originate from a simple typo in the player-defeat screen from the multimillion-selling (and social life-sapping) role-playing game World Of Warcraft. Ever quick to point out errors, gamers added it to their increasingly sarcastic list of put-downs to be fired at would-be adversaries across the internet, and the world’s youth took it to their hearts. Look for it in pupil emails, text messages and their occasional forced regressions to the humble notebook.