I recently heard a word I wasn’t familiar with.

Thinking it was some new internet slang, I asked my teen what “hypermiling” means.

He looked up from his laptop, raised a quizzical eyebrow and said, “Hypermiling? How should I know?”

The boy spends 99% of his waking time on the web. If he didn’t know the word, clearly it wasn’t related to the internet. There was nothing to do but Google it.

Seconds later, Google was showing me hundreds of links and I was discovering a world I didn’t know existed, the world of the hypermilers.

Hypermilers are motorists fixated on squeezing out every last smidgeon of power from the gas they put in their vehicles. The model of car you drive doesn’t matter here. Mercedes owners don’t rank higher than the guy driving a rusty pickup. The only status in this group comes from producing eye-popping mpg’s.

The word “hypermiling” seems to have originated with Wayne Gerdes, a man many regard as the High Priest of the new order. Gerdes clearly knows his stuff. He reportedly once got a standard issue Ford pickup truck to average better than 100 miles per gallon over the course of one long, hot summer.

Gerdes may lead the army, but it’s everyday Jacks and Jills who fill out the ranks of the hypermilers. There’s no membership pledge, no team jacket, no dues to pay. All you need to join is an obsessive-compulsive relationship with your gas tank.

True, some hypermilers see it as a competitive sport. But most hypermilers want only to prevent gasoline from gobbling up most of their paycheck.

As one hypermiler mom told me, “Gasoline rules my budget. I fill up the car first, and then head to the grocery store to spend what’s left on dinner. I never know till I see what the gas pump says whether we’ll be eating hamburgers or Hamburger Helper.”

With a nod toward the design on her T-shirt that says, “Hypermiling is just plain fuelish,” she says, “I figured I either had to learn to use gas as efficiently as possible or convince the kids their favorite dinner is cornflakes.”

Another newby hypermiler explains, “I’ve never been a gear head. Don’t even change my own oil. And I sure never gave any thought to how my driving affected my gas mileage.”

He goes on. “But I saw a magazine article on Gerdes getting 100 miles a gallon from an old truck. He explained how letting the vehicle coast could increase your gas mileage. I tried it and sure enough, it extended the time between fill-ups. That’s how I got interested in hypermiling.”

If hypermiling was born out of frustration with high gas prices, it’s being raised by people who want a lot more than just to save a couple of dollars on gas. The truly dedicated hypermiler wants to join the ranks of the small, almost mythical group of drivers who manage, like Gerdes, to Coast and Pulse and Glide their way to fuel efficiency we mortals can only dream of. Me, I’ll be all too happy if I just learn enough about hypermiling to coax 50 miles per gallon from my old Chevy.