Japanese for Gamers 101: Chuubou –how the word for “kitchen” came to mean “noob”

If you have ever been given grief by a new boy, noob, n00b, newbie, newby, |\|008, or newbee, then today’s Japanese word is just for you. Chuubou (厨房, pronounced “chew bow”, literally “kitchen”) is the approximate Japanese equivalent to the well-worn epithet “noob”. Explaining the etymology of this word is going to be a chore though. So crack open a beer (or Red Bull if you are underage or something decaffeinated if you are on medication), pull up a chair, and delve with me into the crazy world of mis-converted Japanese characters!

Word: 厨房
Romanization/phonetic: Chuubou /chew bow
Etymology: The characters translate as “kitchen”. This is a misconversion of 中坊, which is short for chuugaku (middle school) bouzu (a shaven headed monk, which in turn is an idiom for young kid, likely due to the former Japanese practice of shaving young boys’ heads).
Definition: Roughly equivalent to the English epithet “noob”.
Origin: Possibly 2ch or a similar Japanese BBS.

Notes:

Wikipedia defines Chuubou as a “pejorative term for someone who makes immature comments or performs immature actions on the Internet.” It goes on to say that this word is derived from the expression 中学坊主 (chuugaku bouzu), i.e. “middle-school kid”, which can be abbreviated as 中坊.

At this point, you are probably thinking “You complete fucking idiot. 中坊 and 厨房 are obviously two totally different words. Why are you telling me that “chuubou” means “middle school punk”, but is written as kitchen?”

This has to do with the system most computers use to input Japanese characters. The Japanese language has three writing systems. There are two phonetic alphabets (the kana -hiragana and katakana) and a huge set of borrowed Chinese characters (kanji). Since making a keyboard containing every possible character would require around 50,000 keys, Japanese is entered phonetically on a regular qwerty keyboard. A clever (or sometimes not so clever) piece of software called an Input Method Editor (IME) converts the phonetic spelling into the correct character. But sometimes it doesn’t. Occasionally, the IME fucks up the conversion and you get totally unexpected results. At some point, some l33t J@p@n3s3 h@@x0r5 caught on to this fact, and started intentionally using mis-converted characters for stylistic purposes (or maybe they were just too lazy to fix them). When one enters “chuubou” and converts it to kanji, one in fact gets 厨房 (literally, kitchen), and since it is difficult or impossible to get 中坊 (squirrelly little punk) without breaking the word up in two conversions, this quickly became the accepted spelling.

Special ありがとう to SleepyDan –definitely not a chuubou!- of the Snapped Controller forums for suggesting this topic.