Blerd
noun
a Black person who identifies as a nerd
What does Blerd mean?
Blerd (usually capitalized) refers to a Black person who identifies as a nerd, that is, a person devoted to intellectual, academic, or technical pursuits or interests, or a person preoccupied with or devoted to a particular activity or field of interest (such as video games, anime, science fiction, etc.).
Examples of Blerd
A Milwaukee podcast has a mission to establish a following of people that are proud recipients of a certain social label — Blerds, aka Black nerds. The “Geekset” podcast discusses comics, anime, video games and professional wrestling like many other podcasts, except this group of Black men is holding conversations and producing content from a Blerd’s perspective. The show’s hosts define Blerds as anyone who loves nerdy culture but is Black — leading to a different perspective on nerd culture.
—Drake Bentley, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 15 Apr. 2025
I was just having a similar conversation with my boyfriend over this. He doesn’t like to call himself a gamer despite playing games a lot because that ignores his other nerdy pursuits. He prefers blerd or just nerd. So I guess the definition of a blerd is someone of the culture with great enthusiasm for a niche interest.
—The Blerd community is such a fixture in my life and career, and just for everybody that doesn’t understand, the Blerd community is Black nerds who love everything involving comics, anime, animation, tech, sci-fi, and more. Before I signed that 10-book deal with Dark Horse, I self-published all of my work via Kickstarter. Each one that I did, the Blerd community supported me and meant that they were always successful.
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Where does Blerd come from?
Blerd is a portmanteau of Black and nerd. The term dates back to at least the late 1990s.
A former colleague and I often joke about growing up as “blerds” — black nerds. I arrived at Beaumont High School in 1970 as a geeky freshman. A look at my high school yearbook shows a picture of a goofy-looking kid with nerdy, black eyeglasses. I was uncomfortable and lost when I got there. Mine was an overcrowded school of 3,500 students, and I was a bookwormish kind of kid who preferred reading a book to throwing a football.
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How is Blerd used?
Blerd is used as a neutral or positive self-descriptor, and is not typically used by those who do not identify as such. There is also a related adjective, blerdy.
What’s great about this show, and certainly what was great about doing 2 Dope Queens with Jessica, was that we were sort of two blerdy, off-beat Black women hosting a variety show and just sort of talking about our lives, and we would get messages where people were like, “Oh my God, this is so amazing, so revolutionary.” And Jessica and I were like, “We're just being ourselves.”
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