Spoiler alert: This page turner’s ending is all about the . . . zyzzyva!
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Language Lesson: How to Invent a Word

It’s become a sitcom trope: One character’s remark prompts another character to retort, “That’s not even a word!” or “You can’t just make up words!”

But according to the most widespread, time-honored language lore, people have been inventing words ever since the guttural grunts of one human first morphed into vocal patterns that made sense to other humans.

Let’s settle this with the world’s shortest language lesson, here.

Oh, I see: Making up words is precisely how language happens. When people invent a word, language grows and goes out into the world, keeping robust pace with ever-changing ideas and events until the time comes to pass the torch to other new language.

As the words turn: The word TV (first known use: 1945) spawned TV dinner (1954),
sitcom (1962), dramedy (1978), channel surf (1988) and binge-watch (2003).
Kali9/ iStock

World of Words

According to Global Language Monitor, English speakers alone generate over 5,000 new words a year. While most “new” words of any era fall out of use—When’s the last time you heard someone say icebox, courting, or dungarees?—about 1,000 new words become so embedded in everyday use that they enter the ultimate word hall of fame—the dictionary.

Um, has anyone ever used a dictionary to look up the word dictionary?
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Between Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, 2020’s newbie words include social-distance, WFH (working from home), deprioritize, all-dressed, and a slew of medical terms.  As in, “Now that we social-distance by WFH, we’ve deprioritized business casual, started wearing athleisure, and mostly live on all-dressed pizza.”

As you can see, some new words are old words that have been given new meanings. These new words not only demonstrate the evolution of language and reflect issues affecting our world today, they also annoy the heck out of purists.

To Verb or Not to Verb

For example, maybe you’ve heard someone rail against the practice of turning nouns into verbs, also known as “verbing.” Like when conference becomes conferencing. Someone may even have told you that this isn’t proper English.

Now if only that purist had been around 400 years ago, they could have delivered their complaints to a champion verber—Shakespeare. He transformed nouns like elbow and gossip into verbs, elbowing out old norms and setting purists gossiping.

What’s in a name? Richard Burton models Shakespearean jeggings (2009)
—oops, leg warmers (1915)—oops, pantyhose (1959)—oops, hose (1100s).
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In fact, Shakespeare’s habit of anthimeria is one you probably share. Anthimeria is the use of one part of speech as another, such as when:

• you bookmark a website (noun used as a verb)
• you need a good night’s sleep (verb used a noun)
• or, as one 60s pop song put it, “you keep samin’ when you oughta be changin'” (adjective used as a verb)

Samin’ is not what words do. You might even say, these words were made for walkin’, because language is constantly on the move, dancing to new tunes, topics, and events to communicate new meanings.

Looking Back-Word

As for where humans’ first words came from, sorry, I wasn’t there or I’d’ve made notes. But what I can tell you are some time-honored ways of making up words that we still use today:

1. Adding Suffixes and Prefixes. Undoubtedly, you already know that historically, many words materialized as humans began affixing adorable word parts onto plain old root words. The transformations were limitless!

Current examples: declutter, preexisting, unplug

2. Clipping. Another way we get new words is to give old words a haircut. That’s how public houses became pubs, pianofortes became pianos, fanatics became fans, and typographical errors became typos.

Current examples: celeb (celebrity), prom (promenade), blog (web log), stats (statistics)

Creating words can be a quack up! Onomatopoeia is forming words that imitate sounds.
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3. Blending. If you’ve ever read Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Jabberwocky,” the so-called nonsense words were actually blended words. Carroll called them portmanteau words, after a kind of suitcase that opened into two sections. So slithy actually “packed up” both slimy and lithe, and chortle combined chuckle and snort.

Throughout history, many blended words crossed into mainstream English, such as smog (smoke + fog), motel (motor + hotel), telethon (telephone + marathon), brunch (breakfast + lunch).

Current examples: Brexit (Britain + exit), pixel (picture + element), rom-com (romantic + comedy)

4. Compounding. Similar to blending, compounding coins one new expression from two old words. Backseat driver, bean counter, smiley face, tie dye, and mood ring have been with us since the days of disco inferno, leisure suits, and the floppy disk, but the Bard himself—an avid popularizer of compound words— would have reacted to them with bare-faced, addle-pated confusion.

Current examples: gig economy, dark web, screen time

How to make new words? Borrow from another language—like orange,
from the Arabic word nāranj.
JoshMB/ Pixabay

5. Eponyms. What’s in a name? Words we use on a daily basis. OIC Moments readers know such famous examples as:

• boycott from Irish land agent Charles C. Boycott
• Fahrenheit, from physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit
• America, from Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci

But did you know that words like diesel and nicotine are also eponyms? German engineer Rudolf Diesel gave his name to both the engine and the fuel that powered it, while sixteenth century diplomat Jean Nicot de Villemain apparently introduced tobacco to France. Even sideburns, guppy, shrapnel, mesmerize, and leotard  are named for real people.

An eponym can be based on fiction. Consider paparazzi. In the 1960s Italian film La Dolce Vita, a photographer named Paparazzo works for gossip magazines. The word paparazzo was used because it sounds like the buzz of an annoying insect.

Where are the women, you may ask? Underrepresented. The most famous is Amelia Bloomer. No, she didn’t create bloomers, but her advocacy for women’s rights inspired the name of this alternative to the heavy dresses that restricted women’s movements.

Current examples: Jacuzzi, Darwinian, Tesla

Word twist(er)? Mistakes can create new words. English speakers inverted o and r in
the Spanish word for “thunderstorm,” tronada, and then used this to describe
another kind of extreme weather—the tornado.
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For-Word into the Future!

These are just a few language lessons in how to invent a word. As each new word emerges, the knowledge it carries adds to the lore—and often the allure—of language. You have my word.

What’s the next new word?
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Comment on the post below, or inspire insight with your own OIC Moment here.

Track the journey of OMG into the Oxford English Dictionary, here.

What words were “invented” during your birth year? Find out here!