My first thought was, like RM's, that
cyber- is a prefix, but
cyber is not a word. But you're right, Birdy, there are plenty of examples where it is used in a stand-alone way.
Judging by the texts in the
Corpus of Contemporary American English, the word blossomed in the mid-90s. The first half of that decade has only 15 examples using
cyber, while the second half has 205.
Only a few dictionaries have caught up with this usage. One that has is the
Oxford Dictionary of English:
→ adjective
relating to or characteristic of the culture of computers, information technology, and virtual reality: the cyber age.
- ORIGIN 1980s: abbreviation of cybernetics.
We obviously need a short word with such a meaning, but
cyber probably wasn't an obvious choice.
Cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s to mean the study of control and communication in both natural and artificial systems. (The prefix comes from the Greek for steersman, also related to
govern.)
The path by which
cyber- came to be used specifically for information processing
machines could be an interesting study, but surely one of the key links must be the Cybermen of
Doctor Who - according to
Wikipedia, they first appeared in 1966, long before
cyberspace (William Gibson, 1983) and
cyberpunk (1984).
Anyhow, the word
cyber will be admitted to our list.
