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mouse potato (MOWS poh.tay.toh) n. A person who spends a lot of time at the 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.

By combining their considerable resources, the National Football League, NBC and software powerhouse Microsoft have created a Web site that in its unabashed worship of excess rivals the Super Bowl itself.

There's a complete history of the 30- year-old event, memorable plays of the past, and everything you could possibly want to know about the Cowboys and the Steelers.

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

Notes:
This word appeared originally in Gareth Branwyn's Jargon Watch column, in the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine. (Original definition: "The online and interactive-TV generation's answer to the couch potato.") In an e-mail to the American Dialect Society, Gareth 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).

Related Words:
baked potato
cot potato
hand salsa
word of mouse

Subject Categories:
Computers - General
Sociology - People

Posted on March 27, 1996 at 6:41 AM
Updated on March 27, 1996 at 6:41 AM


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