オタク (otaku)

What it means

1. 1.

   Someone with an all-consuming hobby — anime and games canonically, but also railways, idols or military history. The English borrowing has narrowed to anime alone; the Japanese word has not.

2. 2.

   Now frequently a self-description and only mildly pejorative, though it retained a distinctly unpleasant edge into the 1990s.

   The related 〜オタ suffix is fully neutral: 鉄オタ (train enthusiast), 歴史オタ (history buff).

Examples with translations

• 私、完全に鉄道オタクです。

  I'm a complete train nerd, I admit it.

• オタク友達とイベント行ってきた。

  Went to a convention with my fandom friends.

Where it comes from

From お宅, a formal second-person pronoun literally meaning 'your house'. Fans at 1980s conventions were noted for addressing each other with this oddly distant word, and the pronoun became the label. The murder case of 1989 attached a lasting stigma that took two decades to wear off.

First attested: 1983

Other forms

Romanised as:

otaku

Spellings and variants:

おたく, ヲタ