n.
A person who spends a great deal of of time in front of a computer (cf. couch potato).
Example Citation:
Log onto the World Wide Web, type in the address www.superbowl.com, and you enter a football fantasyland featuring equal amounts of statistics, hype, commercialism and cutting edge Internet technology. ...
It's enough to turn a diehard football fan into a mouse potato, planted in front of a PC, beer in lap.
— David Einstein, "Super Bowl's tangled Web," The San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 1996
Earliest Citation:
Mouse Potato: The online and interactive-TV generation's answer to the couch potato.
—Gareth Branwyn, " Jargon Watch: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/jargon_watch.html," Wired, January 1, 1994
Notes:
In an e-mail to the American Dialect Society, Gareth Branwyn notes that the writer Alice Kahn appears to have coined mouse potato in 1993 (a refererence to her as coiner appears in a message to The Well BBS on September 11, 1993).
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New words. 2013.