I had never heard of the word "obfu" before I came here. I strongly suspect that this "addition" to the English language originated here at Perl Monks. Note however, that the word "obfu" is not actually in any dictionary (hacker or otherwise) that I am aware of.

In Re: Acronyms. (Perlmonks-specific Acronyms), grinder states that "obfu" isn't perl-monks specific, yet it seems to be hardly used outside of PM (though that may well change in the future). At least, using google, I couldn't find any other community of any sort that uses the word "obfu" nearly as much as it's used here.

AFAICT, the first monk to use the word "obfu" is Guildenstern on May 3 2001 in SPOILER! (Guildenstern)Re: How to (ab)use substr, closely followed by damian1301 in Re: How to (ab)use substr. There followed a flurry of uses of this new word in Tribute, PM Drinking Game, Re: Line Noise (deobfuscation attempt), Re: Line Noise and many more. Update: As tye points out the first is cwest in obfu-quicky. Thanks tye (I don't know how to make supersearch search for word "obfu" only, so resorted to google on thepen and must have stuffed it up). Again, my google-fu is not great, so I welcome any corrections to this historical fact. What I'd like to know is: Who is the first Perl Monk to use the word "obfu"?

If anyone can further enlighten me on the origin of the word "obfu" I'd be most grateful (I'm preparing my next installment of the lighter side of Perl series, you see ;-).

In reply to The origin of the word "obfu" by eyepopslikeamosquito

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