Skip to main content
Ellen Nerked her audience,... and they loved it!
nerked by golftea October 20, 2013
Related Words

Knee-Necked 

The act of a police officer placing their knee on the neck of a person restrained on the ground thereby cutting off oxygen. Knee-necking for prolonged periods results in the person on the ground losing consciousness and, in some cases, ceasing to breath.
Kyle: Did you see what happened to that guy in Minneapolis?
Roger: No man, what happened?
Kyle: The cops knee-necked him and he died.
Roger: Damn, that's messed up.
Typically applied to online regularly-changed/updated video games.

To "nerf" something means to reduce its 'power' or effectiveness within the game. Often times this is to solve some problem in the game (such as an 'overpowered' weapon/ability or super effective strategy), or to push the players in one direction or another (such as a new cosmetic/item/character).

Nerfs affect the 'meta' or prevailing strategy/characters/items used to win the game. In this way nerfs also give control to the developer of how the players play the game. i.e. nerfing a commonly used item to discourage the community from playing with it.

Some nerfs can be so drastic they change the very fundamentals of the game, and are often a contributing factor to the size of the playerbase, for good or bad.

Outside of games, this would again mean to reduce the things 'power' or 'effectiveness'. The exact analogy that gave birth to this term, is that of a Nerf Gun, compared to a real gun.
Oh man, they totally nerfed 'Titans Armor'! Guess I'll stop playing Golem now :/

They nerfed Irelia again?? Oh wait, its actually a buff. <-- (opposite of nerf)

Great, so now all the free-2-play guns are nerfed, guess I have to buy some to keep competitive. :(
The term "nerfing" comes from the online gaming world of Ultima Online.

At one point in the game, the developers reduced the power of swords in melee combat.

This resulted in players complaining that it was like they were hitting each other with nerf bats, not swords.

From then on, if ever something gets made less worth while than it had been originally, it is considered 'nerfed'
"Oh man, they reduced the dmg on the berserker class and now it's totally nerfed!"

"Damn, the Devs nerfed those axe's real good!"
nerfed by Dave Elliott January 11, 2005
To be attacked immediately after beginning a Minecraft survival game.
Brandon totally got nirked in that last game!
nirked by TotalSpyGirl October 21, 2015
The act of hitting someone ridiculously hard on the back of the neck
Damn, did you see him get necked that must have hurt like a bitch
Necked by Tuc Az September 7, 2016