Slang dictionary
choob
[choob]
What does choob mean?
Choob is gaming slang for a high-level player that acts like a noob, or “a newbie,” to annoy or disrespect other players.
Choob also represents a British, Irish, and Scottish English pronunciation of tube, which can refer to the subway or serve as a mildly offensive insult for a “stupid person.”
Where does choob come from?
The slang choob is closely associated with the MMORPG fantasy game RuneScape, first released in 2001. The slang choob is recorded by 2006 in a RuneScape handbook, and may be a blend of choose and noob, or a new, unskilled person in an online community. It may also be intended to sound funny.
RuneScape became notorious for people scamming one another for gold in the world of the game as well as players being extremely annoying to new players. This is the essence of being a choob. Other such choob behaviors including constantly asking for help or pushing the game’s sprites into structures.
Elsewhere in slang, choob is a spelling based on the British, Irish, and Scottish English pronunciation of tube, as the London Underground, popularly called the Tube. In these dialects, tube, pronounced as choob, is also an insult for a “stupid person” (hollow, like a tube) evidenced since at least 1997.
Examples of choob
Who uses choob?
Choob appears to have lost much of its currency in the gaming community, with troll the more common term now.
In the UK, however, choob can be heard everyday on the streets, whether someone is taking the Tube to work in London …
Most people: YouTube
An English person: Y’choob— Ivycado 🥑✨ (@IvyKungu) June 15, 2018
… or poking fun of friends in Glasgow. Don’t go calling some random guy at the pub a choob or you might get into a brawl, you’ve been warned.
i miss using proper scots words. i like my pals down here but i miss being able to use words like choob, foosty, glaikit, etc without having to translate :(
— 𝕄𝕒𝕘𝕟𝕦𝕤 (@PerthshireMags) January 17, 2018
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of choob like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of choob that will help our users expand their word mastery.