Birth of a new word

For the uninitiated, Merriam-Webster has added nearly 700 new words to the dictionary over the last month – some of which are being quite candidly used by GenZ in their daily lives.

Recent dictionary debutants include rizz, simp, goated, mid, ngl abbreviation (informal not gonna lie; not going to lie), rage quit, thirst trap, doomscroll, girlboss among others.

According to Global Language Monitor (GLM), 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. The GLM states that a new word is created every 98 minutes, about 14.7 words a day or 5,400 words a year.

So, who comes up with these words, how and what determines whether they catch on?

The master neologist that the world knows of is William Shakespeare because at least 500 words (including critic, swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works but in no way can we know whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things he had picked up elsewhere.

John Milton, on the other hand, gave us 630 coinages, including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium while Geoffrey Chaucer came up with universe, approach; Ben Jonson with rant, petulant; John Donne with self-preservation, valediction and Sir Thomas More delivered atonement, and anticipate.

In times past, when frustrating circumstances demanded new ways of expressing what it means to be alive, it was often female writers who sculpted the fresh coinages that kept language rippling with poignancy and power. The word ‘frustrating’ itself, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, makes its first appearance in print in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, where she presciently describes “the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions and their frustrating complexity”.

Taking as our inspiration such gifted wordsmiths as George Eliot and Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Dorothy Wordsworth, perhaps we can distil some helpful principles – some new rules, to do a Dua Lipa — for sculpting a vocabulary to describe the surreal realities that will surely come to define tense and trying times. However, till date, we do not have a clear idea whom to thank for most of our lexicon but we can surely understand some of the mechanisms behind the birth of new words.

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).

There is no quicker way to elevate a word into grandiloquence than to stick on to the end of it the suffix ‘-ism’, three small letters that can canonise seemingly throwaway syllables and transport them into the realm of respectable doctrine, system or movement.

We can also create 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.

Compounding involves the juxtaposition of two existing words. Typically, compound words begin 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 married together too: into (preposition), nobody (pronoun), daydream (verb), awe-inspiring, environmentally friendly (adjectives).

Repurposing is also common which means taking a word from one context and applying it to another.

Taking a word from one word class and transplanting it to another is called conversion, which is also a common mechanism.

Words named after a person or place also hold a place of prominence in the creation of a word. For example, Alzheimer’s, atlas, cheddar, alsatian, diesel, sandwich, mentor, svengali, wellington and boycott are eponyms while gun, bigot, bugger, cretin, currant, hooligan, marmalade, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, tawdry, doggerel, doily and sideburns are the same as well. The debate revolves more around whether, and for how long, do we retain the capital letters on eponyms.

Abbreviations are 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”).

Interestingly, at least 350 languages have contributed to English’s half-inched words. 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).

Onomatopoeia involves the creation of a word by imitation of the sound it is supposed to make. Plop, barf, cuckoo, bunch, bump and midge all originated this way.

Reduplication or near-repetition of a word or sound like 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 is also one of the mechanisms.

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.

Another way to reinvigorate a lacklustre lexicon is to pull together words that have never been tethered before — a little like constructing an impromptu meal from random reached-for tins dragged to light from the fumbled darkness of a kitchen cupboard.

Charlotte Brontë was a genius of such curiously compelling compounds. To her, it is likely we owe the origin of ‘self-doubt’ and ‘Wild-West’ as well as that activity to which many of us have found ourselves suddenly engaging with obsessive vigour: ‘spring-clean’, which Brontë niftily neologised in a letter she wrote in April 1848.

Another mechanism includes 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 — examples include sitcom, paratroops, internet and gazunder.

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.

It’s no surprise that many of these words are GenZ-dominated, as with each generation comes a new set of slang terms. For GenX, they loved to throw around ‘chill pill, ‘gnarly’ and ‘diss’ while millennials preferred ‘Netflix and chill’, ‘AF’, ‘spilling the tea’ and ‘woke’.

GenZ, the generation born between 1996 and 2012, have already introduced us to ‘mid’, ‘slay’ and ‘main character energy’, but there are a whole host of GenZ terms that are confusing older generations.

According to a recent survey, the words ‘choong’, ‘leng’ and ‘it slaps’ are the most likely to confuse people aged over 45.

In fact, nearly half (49 per cent) of the 2,000 people polled during a recent survey believe that GenZ has the quirkiest terminology out of all generations.

On the flip side, just 32 per cent of GenZ respondents had heard of the Baby Boomer term ‘far out’ while 51 per cent of GenZ had heard of ‘groovy’.

It thus appears that every generation invents its own fresh take on colloquial English, and for some, it’s very important to be up to date with current phrases or stay in the loop to feel more involved in such a cultural discourse.

Views expressed are personal