Fan began as a clipped American form of fanatic
Merriam-Webster and Oxford treat fan as a shortened fanatic, a word that entered English from Latin via fanaticus for temple frenzy. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans said "the fancy" for avid sports followers; British English still prefers supporter for many team devotees.
A fan exhibits strong interest or admiration for a person, team, or pastime—sometimes enough to reorder daily life around fixtures, fandoms, or collecting. Synonyms include aficionado and enthusiast, but fan dominates U.S. sports talk. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary cites William Henry Nugent, who traced the word to the fancy, a label from the early 1700s into the 1800s for followers of a hobby or sport, boxing above all. Fanatic itself reached English around 1550, carrying a sense of excessive, uncritical devotion.
Supporter is older than fan and still dominates British talk about sports teams, though fan has spread across the English-speaking world, and in politics followers are usually called supporters even when fan clubs exist. Some fans overhaul their lives around their passion and show it by attending conventions, posting online or flying team banners. Groupies follow a band on tour, and the most intense devotees may imagine a personal bond with a star that does not exist, a cousin of the one-sided parasocial relationship. Musicals attract their own followings, such as the Rentheads of Rent and the Phans of The Phantom of the Opera, which Playbill listed among the top ten musical fandoms of 2018.
Wrestling fans split into marks, who believe the action is real, and smarks, who know it is staged kayfabe yet enjoy it anyway. In Japan otaku is usually an insult, while in English it mostly means anime and manga enthusiasts. Organized science fiction fandom took shape in the 1920s through magazine letter columns and went on to spawn fanzines, conventions and the Hugo Awards. It even built its own slang, fanspeak, named after Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four: an actifan runs conventions or fanzines, a passifan simply enjoys the genre, a Big Name Fan is famous within the scene, and the plural of fan became fen.
Source: Fan (person)
