The Rice University Neologisms Database

To destroy a person with such utterly excessive force that pieces of his body splatter all over a room (luckily, this word has found no application in the real world…). (‘I’m going to gib you next chance I get.’) The current meaning of gib is unchanged from the verb coined by IdSoft. To gib something is to destroy it utterly, to do so much damage that the object in question is literally blasted into small ‘giblets’. The process by which gib was formed seems clear: a clipping of the common word giblet. At the time, the programmers probably wanted a word that was new and distinctive, but at the same time very clear. When they realized how much the bloody chunks issuing from player polygons looked like giblets, the name stuck. I have seen this word hundreds of times; I have no idea where I saw it first. Gib was coined by the programmers at Id Software when they released Quake two years ago; it has since made its way into the language. It is usually applied only to people, and it has yet to find use outside the online action gaming community (Quake and a few others), but it is widely used in this sphere.