The word maven comes from Hebrew mebîn and Yiddish meyvn meaning ‘someone who understands’. The word first came into American English in the 1960s, popularized between 1964 and 1969 by TV and radio commercials for Vita Herring (the flagship product of US company Vita Food Products Inc.), which featured a catchy jingle and enthusiastic recommendations from a herring connoisseur dubbed The Beloved Herring Maven. The word gained further exposure in the 1980s by US journalist William Safire, a former columnist for the New York Times, who regularly wrote about language-related topics and referred to himself as the language maven. More recently, Maven was the name given to an artificial opponent created for a computer version of the popular word game Scrabble®.

The word maven comes from Hebrew mebîn and Yiddish meyvn meaning ‘someone who understands’. The word first came into American English in the 1960s, popularized between 1964 and 1969 by TV and radio commercials for Vita Herring (the flagship product of US company Vita Food Products Inc.), which featured a catchy jingle and enthusiastic recommendations from a herring connoisseur dubbed The Beloved Herring Maven. The word gained further exposure in the 1980s by US journalist William Safire, a former columnist for the New York Times, who regularly wrote about language-related topics and referred to himself as the language maven. More recently, Maven was the name given to an artificial opponent created for a computer version of the popular word game Scrabble®.