How new words are born

Andy Bodle

English speakers already have over a million words at our disposal – so why
are we adding 1,000 new ones a year to the lexicon? And how?

As dictionary publishers never tire of reminding us, our language is growing. Not
content with the million or so words they already have at their disposal, English
speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary
debutants include blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku,
twerk and Brexit.

But these represent just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg. According to
Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s only the
1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print. Who
invents these words, and how? What rules govern their formation? And what
determines whether they catch on?
Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, because at least 500 words
(including critic, swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works – but we have no
way of knowing whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things
he’d picked up elsewhere.

It’s generally agreed that the most prolific minter of words was John Milton, who gave
us 630 coinages, including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium. Geoffrey Chaucer
(universe, approach), Ben Jonson (rant, petulant), John Donne (self-preservation,
valediction) and Sir Thomas More (atonement, anticipate) lag behind. It should come as
no great surprise that writers are behind many of our lexical innovations. But the fact is,
we have no idea who to credit for most of our lexicon.

If our knowledge of the who is limited, we have a rather fuller understanding of the how.
All new words are created by one of 13 mechanisms:

1 Derivation
The commonest method of creating a new word is to add a prefix or suffix to an existing
one. Hence realisation (1610s), democratise (1798), detonator (1822), preteen (1926),
hyperlink (1987) and monogamish (2011).
2 Back formation
The inverse of the above: the creation of a new root word by the removal of a phantom
affix. The noun sleaze, for example, was back-formed from “sleazy” in about 1967. A
similar process brought about pea, liaise, enthuse, aggress and donate. Some linguists
propose a separate category for lexicalisation, the turning of an affix into a word (ism,
ology, teen), but it’s really just a type of back formation.
3 Compounding
The juxtaposition of two existing words. Typically, compound words begin life as
separate entities, then get hitched with a hyphen, and eventually become a single unit.
It’s mostly nouns that are formed this way (fiddlestick, claptrap, carbon dating, bailout),
but words from other classes can be smooshed together too: into (preposition), nobody
(pronoun), daydream (verb), awe-inspiring, environmentally friendly (adjectives).
4 Repurposing
Taking a word from one context and applying it to another. Thus the crane, meaning
lifting machine, got its name from the long-necked bird, and the computer mouse was
named after the long-tailed animal.
5 Conversion
Taking a word from one word class and transplanting it to another. The word giant was
for a long time just a noun, meaning a creature of enormous size, until the early 15th
century, when people began using it as an adjective. Thanks to social media, a similar
fate has recently befallen friend, which can now serve as a verb as well as a noun (“Why
didn’t you friend me?”).
6 Eponyms
Words named after a person or place. You may recognise Alzheimer’s, atlas, cheddar,
alsatian, diesel, sandwich, mentor, svengali, wellington and boycott as eponyms – but
did you know that gun, dunce, bigot, bugger, cretin, currant, hooligan, marmalade,
maudlin, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, tawdry, doggerel, doily and sideburns are
too? (The issue of whether, and for how long, to retain the capital letters on eponyms is
a thorny one.)
7 Abbreviations
An increasingly popular method. There are three main subtypes: clippings, acronyms
and initialisms. Some words that you might not have known started out longer are pram
(perambulator), taxi/cab (both from taximeter cabriolet), mob (mobile vulgus), goodbye
(God be with you), berk (Berkshire Hunt), rifle (rifled pistol), canter (Canterbury
gallop), curio (curiosity), van (caravan), sport (disport), wig (periwig), laser (light
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), scuba (self-contained underwater
breathing apparatus), and trump (triumph. Although it’s worth noting that there’s
another, unrelated sense of trump: to fabricate, as in “trumped-up charge”).
8 Loanwords
Foreign speakers often complain that their language is being overrun with borrowings
from English. But the fact is, English itself is a voracious word thief; linguist David
Crystal reckons it’s half-inched words from at least 350 languages. Most words are
borrowed from French, Latin and Greek; some of the more exotic provenances are
Flemish (hunk), Romany (cushty), Portuguese (fetish), Nahuatl (tomato – via Spanish),
Tahitian (tattoo), Russian (mammoth), Mayan (shark), Gaelic (slogan), Japanese
(tycoon), West Turkic (horde), Walloon (rabbit) and Polynesian (taboo). Calques (flea
market, brainwashing, loan word) are translations of borrowings.
9 Onomatopeia
The creation of a word by imitation of the sound it is supposed to make. Plop, ow, barf,
cuckoo, bunch, bump and midge all originated this way.
10 Reduplication
The repetition, or near-repetition, of a word or sound. To this method we owe the likes
of flip-flop, goody-goody, boo-boo, helter-skelter, picnic, claptrap, hanky-panky, hurly-
burly, lovey-dovey, higgledy-piggledy, tom-tom, hip hop and cray-cray. (Willy-nilly,
though, came to us via a contraction of “Will he, nill he”.)
11 Nonce words
Words pulled out of thin air, bearing little relation to any existing form. Confirmed
examples are few and far between, but include quark (Murray Gell-Mann), bling
(unknown) and fleek (Vine celebrity Kayla Newman).
12 Error
Misspellings, mishearings, mispronunciations and mistranscriptions rarely produce new
words in their own right, but often lead to new forms in conjunction with other
mechanisms. Scramble, for example, seems to have originated as a variant of scrabble;
but over time, the two forms have taken on different meanings, so one word has now
become two. Similarly, the words shit and science, thanks to a long sequence of shifts and
errors, are both ultimately derived from the same root. And the now defunct word
helpmeet, or helpmate, is the result of a Biblical boo-boo. In the King James version, the
Latin adjutorium simile sibi was rendered as “an help meet for him” – that is, “a helper
suitable for him”. Later editors, less familiar with the archaic sense of meet, took the
phrase to be a word, and began hyphenating help-meet.
13 Portmanteaus
Compounding with a twist. Take one word, remove an arbitrary portion of it, then put in
its place either a whole word, or a similarly clipped one. Thus were born sitcom,
paratroops, internet, gazunder and sexting. (Note: some linguists call this process
blending and reserve the term portmanteau for a particular subtype of blend. But since
Lewis Carroll, who devised this sense of portmanteau, specifically defined it as having
the broader meaning, I’m going to use the terms willy-nilly.)
Some words came about via a combination of methods: yuppie is the result of initialism
((y)oung and (up)wardly mobile) plus derivation (+ -ie); berk is a clipped eponym
(Berkshire hunt); cop, in the sense of police officer, is an abbreviation of a derivation
(copper derives from the northern British dialect verb cop, meaning to catch); and snarl-
up is a conversion (verb to noun) of a compound (snarl + up).

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The popularity of the various methods has waxed and waned through the ages. For long
periods (1100-1500 and 1650-1900), borrowings from French were in vogue. In the 19th
century, loanwords from Indian languages (bangle, bungalow, cot, juggernaut, jungle,
loot, shampoo, thug) were the cat’s pyjamas. There was even a brief onslaught from Dutch
and Flemish.
In the 20th century, quite a few newbies were generated by derivation, using the -ie (and
-y) suffix: talkies, freebie, foodie, hippy, roomie, rookie, roofie, Munchie, Smartie,
Crunchie, Furby, scrunchie. Abbreviations, though, were the preferred MO, perhaps
because of the necessity in wartime of delivering your message ASAP. The passion for
initialisms seems to be wearing off, perhaps because things have got a little confusing;
PC, for example, can now mean politically correct, police constable, per cent, personal
computer, parsec, post cibum, peace corps, postcard, professional corporation or
printed circuit.

But today, when it comes to word formation, there’s only one player in town: the
portmanteau. Is this a bodacious development – or a disastrophe? I’ll get the debate
rolling tomorrow.