I just really hate the word "fandom". It's just a portmanteau of "fan" and "random". It sounds like some desperate attempt to be quirky and different. Plus, the word "fanbase" already exists.
idk, i thought it was fan + kingdom, or fanatic + domain??
but yeah, it is a bit weird how we have âfandomâ when âfanbaseâ already existed? but thatâs language for you, always changing all the time
Actually, Anon, fandom is significantly older than fan base or fanbase; the OED gives the first known citation of fandom meaning âthe community of fans of a thingâ from 1903, while their first entry for fan base isnât until the 1970s. If you compare the frequencies of the two terms in Google Ngram Viewer, youâll see that fandom has historically been far more frequent, with fan base running a distant second (and the closed form fanbase an even more distant third).
The OED also rejects your portmanteau hypothesis, though I suppose sportswriters from the 1900s mightâve been trying to be quirky and different when they coined fandom from the productive derivational suffix -dom, which the OED also gives copies examples of throughout the 1800s (including BA-dom, old fogey-dom, blizzard-dom and theater-dom.
Respect the fandom, guys. Itâs older than Steve Rogers.Â
So, seeing as the OED does not provide free access to its sources, I looked this up. According to various webpages, included this one, âfandomâ was used in 1903 by the Cincinnati Enquirer to refer to baseball fans.
Thus not only do we have an early example of a word that combines âfanaticâ with â-domâ as in âkingdomâ, we also have a useful reminder that when it comes to excessively liking things to the point of it being its own subculture, people who are into sports have the rest of us beat by several orders of magnitude.
baseball heritage post
another win for baseball, the greatest sport ever



















