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At the beginning of the 20th century, it was most likely that the insult used would be ¡°bookworm¡± (or, for women, a?¡°bluestocking¡±).

Then in the 1930s and 1940s, thinkers were increasingly told that they lived in ¡°ivory ?towers¡±, and by 1960, also had a decent chance of being labelled an ¡°egghead¡±.

As the IT revolution, video game culture and personal computers took off in the 1980s, the obsessively cerebral were ¡°geeks¡± or ¡°nerds¡± ¨C?although these are no?longer really serious terms of abuse.

¡°Boffin¡± has always remained a niche choice, but has enjoyed slow, steady growth since the middle of the century.

The results were ?created using the Google Ngram tool, which scours a vast corpus of books to?find how often different words are used.

david.matthews@tesglobal.com