Word.ws English Dictionary

playbor

playbor noun: a hybrid form of play and labour, specifically in the games industry.

Noun

playbor (uncountable)

  1. A hybrid form of play and labour, specifically in the games industry.
    • The fun, pleasurable aspect of playbor troubles scholars because it seems to suggest that playborers are not exploited; exploitation is supposed to be immiserating, not fun. Furthermore, the characterization of playbor as exploitative might easily be read as something of an insult to the...2018 January 16, Greg Goldberg, Antisocial Media: Anxious Labor in the Digital Economy, NYU Press, →ISBN, page 51

Forms of playbor

alternative formplaybour

Origin of playbor

Blend of play + labor, coined by Julian Kücklich Julian Kücklich in 2005.

Words formed from playbor

  • playborer

Questions about playbor

What does playbor mean?
Playbor means a hybrid form of play and labour, specifically in the games industry.
What part of speech is playbor?
Playbor is a noun.

Words near playbor in the dictionary

  1. playboaters
  2. playboating
  3. playboats
  4. playbook
  5. playbooks
  6. playbor
  7. playbour
  8. playbox
  9. playboxes
  10. playboy
  11. Playboy Bunnies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: playbor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “playbor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/playbor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.