A headline on a 2021 New York Times article made a bold claim: President Biden was a geek. A “Watch Geek in Chief,” to be exact. The president’s affinity for luxury timepieces — he wore a Rolex at his inauguration — had caught the eye of the Styles desk.

The noun “geek” dates to the late 19th century, when it was an American slang word for a “foolish, offensive” or “worthless” person, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. By 1919, a “geek” was a circus entertainer performing grotesque acts, like biting the heads off animals. In 1946, The Times reviewed “Nightmare Alley,” a novel about a man who joins a carnival and learns “what makes a geek bite the heads off chickens.”

From this definition grew a more modern one. By the second half of the 20th century, a “geek” was a social outcast, though not one performing in sideshows. This “geek” was “an overly diligent, unsociable student,” or “any unsociable person obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit,” per the Oxford dictionary.

Benjamin Nugent, who wrote the book “American Nerd,” and a Times Magazine article about “nerds,” suggested that the meanings of “geek” and “nerd” converged in the 1970s. (He cited a 1980 On Language article by William Safire, who wrote that “pencil geek” was a synonym for “nerd” on some college campuses, as an early example.) Mr. Nugent said in an interview that the words became associated because both were initially “terms of abuse for unappealing people.”

Perhaps because of its meanspirited nature, “geek” appeared sparingly in The Times. When it did, the word was often in articles about high school. In 1977, an article mentioned a belief at one high school that anyone who boycotted the prom “on either feminist or philosophical grounds was probably a phony — either a cheapskate, or a geek who couldn’t get a date.” In a 1984 review of the movie “Sixteen Candles,” the writer described Molly Ringwald’s moody protagonist as “being pursued by a character who is known as the Geek.”

In 1987, Gary Panter, a painter and cartoonist quoted in The Times, anointed Pee-wee Herman as the “new ascendant geek or the triumphant nerd — the type of person who in the 50’s no one talked to but who is now the height of fashion.” He was right: As the decades passed, “geeks,” in defiance of the word’s definition, had gained some social status.

Mr. Nugent said that as “nerd” became linked “with technology and engineering prowess,” so, too, did “geek.” The words “became a way of talking about how people with nonnormative behaviors were now useful and powerful and sought after,” he added.

In 2019, Merrill Perlman, a former Times editor, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that the verb form of “geek” also helped shake the word of its negative history, citing as examples “geek up” (to excite) and “geek out,” which in the 1990s was linked to computing. But the slang widened: A 2005 Times Opinion essay explained that “to geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal — and to have a good time doing it.” One no longer just “geeked out” over computers; you could geek out over cars, music or, in President Biden’s case, watches.

Today, being a “geek” or “nerd” is seen as a point of pride, said Maya Phillips, a Times arts and culture critic who explored “nerd culture” in a 2022 book. When she was a child, she said in an interview, being called a geek or a nerd was “derogatory.”

But by the mid 2000s, she said, “it became a signifier of someone who was ahead of the curve and able to figure out elements of pop culture that would become mainstream.”