owned adj : having an owner; often used in combination; "state-owned railways" [ant: unowned]

English

Pronunciation

Verb

owned

1. past of own

Owned is a slang word, that originated among 1990s hackers, where it referred to "rooting" or gaining administrative control over someone elses computer.

The term's original usage was close to that of the traditional meaning of the word "own" - for instance, "I owned the network at MIT" indicated that the speaker had cracked the servers and had the same root-level privileges that the legitimate owner of the servers had. "Owned", a later variant, became more common in the late 1990s, as did the more abstract usage referring to any compromised security mechanism. By 1997, "owned" was regularly used in website defacements, and it subsequently spread to gaming circles, where it was used to refer to defeat in a game. For example, in Counter Strike Source or Call of Duty 4, if someone make a particularly good kill shot, they might say owned or pwned.

Owned has now spread beyond computer and gaming contexts and become part of standard slang, where it typically entails severe defeat or humiliation, usually in an amusing way or through the dominance of an opposing party. Other variations of the word owned include own3d, 0wn3d and oaned, terms which incorporate elements of leetspeak.

It seems a popular pastime is to write "owned", "pwned", "pwn3d", etc, on pictures depicting humiliation or defeat. There have been several websites dedicated to this such as Owned.com. This site also contains videos of similar situations (many of which can also be found on YouTube. There is even a facebook application that is dedicated to this idea (found here).

References