Some words are coined. Pwn was fumbled. On a standard keyboard, P sits right next to O, and somewhere in the world of online gaming, "owned" was mistyped as "pwned". The typo stuck.

To own someone in a game was to dominate them completely. Pwn meant the same, with an extra layer of mockery: a word that was itself a mistake, used to rub in someone else's. It became a staple of leetspeak, the hacker and gamer style of writing that swaps letters for numbers and symbols, alongside n00b and h4x0r. Cambridge Dictionary now defines pwn as to defeat or take control of someone or something, usually in an internet video game.

Nobody agrees how to say it, which is fitting for a word born as a typo. Wikipedia gives "pohnd", like "owned" with a P in front.

In gaming chat the word now sounds like the 2000s, when "you got pwned" was typed after every crushing defeat. But it found a second, much more serious home. In computer security, a pwned system or account is one that has been compromised. On 4 December 2013 the security researcher Troy Hunt launched Have I Been Pwned?, a free site that tells you whether your email address has turned up in a data breach.

So pwned is half dead: retired as a taunt, still working as a warning.