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Lamer is a jargon or slang name originally applied in cracker and phreaker culture to someone who didn't really understand what he was doing. Today it is also loosely applied by IRC, BBS, and online gaming users to anyone perceived to be contemptible. In general, the term has come to describe someone who is intentionally ignorant of how things work.

The term is derived from lame. A lamer is widely understood to be the antithesis of a hacker. While a hacker strives to understand the mechanisms behind what he uses, even when such extended knowledge would have no practical value, a lamer only cares to learn the bare minimum necessary to operate the device in the way originally intended. Thus, a lamer is usually indistinguishable from someone who is too lame to understand why something works even if they wanted to. A lamer's attitude is summed up by the phrase, "I don't care how it works, just that it does".

In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old.

This term seems to have originated in the Commodore 64 scene in the mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by ‘Lamer Exterminator’, the most famous and feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of the string “LAMER!”.^[1]

Lamer is now commonly applied to individuals perceived to be contemptible. The proliferation of computer-mediated communication media such as IRC or BBSes may be partly responsible for bringing the term into common parlance.

Lamer has become a word misused in meaning, in the way that stupid, gay, and retarded are misused to describe something contemptible.

Generally, the more specialized and developed the culture, the more lamer is used as it was defined originally. In less exclusive cultures such as online gaming and IRC, the term has lost its original meaning.

• Definition of lame - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
• Who is a lamer? - Recommendations on how to avoid being judged lame
• Lamer - Another description of a lamer.
• Definition of Lamer - Jargon File - Origination of term lamer.