digerati [its definition]

As coined by New York Times editor Tim Race: people highly skilled in the processing and manipulation of digital information; wealthy or scholarly technonerds. Always plural. First appeared in a January 1992 article
(that Race edited) by Times reporter John Markoff.

William Safire seized upon the neologism in his Sunday column: “ Literati, Italian for the Latin litterati, means ‘the intellectual set.’ In the 1930’s a portmanteau word was formed to blend the world of glittering celebrities with these intellectuals: glitterati. Now all that glitters in digital, from the latin for ‘finger,’ and later applied to a number that can be counted on the 10 fingers. Hence, digerati, ‘computer intellectuals,’a word sure to flash through the world’s electronic mailboxes.”

Today, Markoff says, digerati is a stand in for “digital elite” the powerful engineers, the Third Wave intellectuals, and power brokers of the wired world.



Wired Style
Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age from the Editors of Wired
edited by Constance Hale
copyright 1996 by HardWired

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