Where do new words come from?

Every year about a thousand new words are added to the Oxford English
Dictionary. With over 170,000 words currently in use in the English
Language, it might seem we already have plenty. Yet, as world changes,
new ideas and inventions spring forth, and science progresses, our existing
words leave gasps in what we want to express and we feel those gaps in
several ingenious, practical, and occasionally peculiar ways .

One way is to absorb a word from another language. English has borrowed
so many words over its history that nearly half of its vocabulary comes
directly from other languages. Sometimes this is simply because the thing
the word describes was borrowed itself. Rome and France brought legal,
religious concepts like “altar” and “jury” to Medieval English while trade
brought crops and cuisine, like Arabian coffee, Italian spaghetti and Indian
curry. But sometimes, another language has just the right word for a
complex idea or emotion, like naiveté, machismo. Scientists also use
classical language to name new concepts. Clone, for example, was derived
from the Ancient Greek word for twig to describe creating a new plant
from a piece of the old. And today, the process works both ways, with
English lending words like software to languages all over the world.
Another popular way to fill a vocabulary gap is by combining existing
words that each convey part of the new concept. This can be done by
combining two whole words into a compound word, like airport, or
starfish, or by clipping or blending parts of words together, like spork,
brunch or internet. And unlike borrowing from other languages, these can
often be understood the first time you hear them. And sometimes a new
word isn’t new at all. Obsolete words gain new life by adopting new
meanings. Villain originally meant a peasant farmer, but in a twist of
aristocratic snobbery came to mean someone not bound by the knightly
code of chivalry and, therefore, a bad person. A geek went from being a
carnival performer to any strange person to a specific type of awkward
genius. And other times, words come to mean their opposite through
irony, metaphor or misuse, like when sick or wicked are used to describe
something literally amazing. But if words can be formed in all these ways,
why do some become mainstream while others fall out of use or never
catch on in their first place? Sometimes the answer is simple, as when
scientists or companies give an official name to a new discovery or
technology. Some countries have language academies to make the
decisions, But for the most part, official sources like dictionarles only
document current usage. New words don’t originate from above, but from
ordinary people spreading words that hit the right combination of useful
and catchy. Take the word meme, coinedin the 1970s by sociobiologist
Richard Dawkins from the Ancient word for imitation. He used it to
describe how ideas and symbls propagate through a culture like genes
through a population. With the advent of the Internet, the process
became directly observable in how jokes and images were popularized at
lightning speed. And soon the word came to refer to a certain kind of
image. So meme not only describes how words become part of language,
the word is itself a meme. And there’s a word for this phenomenon of
words that describe themselves: autological. Not all new words are
created equal. Some stick around for millennia, some adapt to changing
times, and others die off. Some relay information, some interpret it, but
the way these words are created and the journey they take to become
part of our speech tell us a lot about our world and how to communicate
within it.