How New Words Come Into Being: You Can Create New Words

Have you heard any new words lately? New words come into being in many different ways, often quite unexpectedly.

Life happens. Suddenly, there may not be just the right word that states what has just happened. A new word may be spoken, accidentally. At times, that new word is appropriate, even perfect for what is happening. 

For example, ‘earthquake’ becomes ‘earthquiver’, a combination of two words.

At other times, a new word is not appropriate and it disappears, as quickly as it comes into being. Anyone can coin a new word or try to do so. Sometimes, words come into being purely by accident. They can be coined intentionally when someone is writing.

Not every new word is necessarily accepted or approved. Many words never go into dictionaries, much less into online dictionaries. Some new words are never re-used. At other times, the same new word can have different meanings to different people or in different parts of the world. New words come about when people do not understand other languages, but try to explain something in terms of concepts.

Children often contribute to words that families use. You hear young children talking to one another in what appears to be some kind of babble. They use words that may not make sense to you, but the children seem to understand each other. Some of these words, their parents and other family members understand, but not always. Families may continue to use these words indefinitely, with respect to their children. 

Words continually evolve and devolve, often coming into a language and then disappearing from that language again, over time. For example, consider the words, thee and thou. We still understand these words today, but words like these are disappearing under the guise of being obsolete.

“Old words don’t die; they just wait to be rescued. Dictionary-makers should know better than to say that words ever become extinct.”

Perhaps the most recent and largest influx of new words has come about through the advent of the Internet and the use of computer e-mail. Now, innovative smart phones are instrumental in the introduction of new words that only people who are text messaging, at that moment in time, create and understand.

At times, words begin as short-forms, like biz for business or are abbreviated forms of a collection of words like biz fax for business fax. These are new words created in an attempt to convey some kind of meaning.

New words may originate from the first letters of the words in a statement. On the Internet, the expression OMG is an e-mail expression or a text message meaning, “Oh my God”. OMG, what is happening to our words!

Then, there is the discourse element that allows for the introduction of new words into political realms.

“SOPA, PIPA Opponents Celebrate, but Say Work Isn’t Done”, a recent article on “CSO Data Protection” has new words that might be of interest to those who like collecting them. The words, “SOPA” or “Stop Online Piracy Protection Act” and “PIPA” or “Protect Intellectual Property Act” have recently appeared on the horizon in conjunction with data protection on the Internet.

Here is a new word, from learn-english-today.com, this time one created from the combination of two different words.

“Affluenza” is a “a blend of ‘affluence’ and ‘influenza’: A social disease resulting from extreme materialism and excessive consumerism: earning more money and consuming more, which can lead to overwork, debt, waste, stress, anxiety, etc.”

Many of the newly created words appear to be appropriate in certain circles. 

For example,

For Internet users, “weblish” is “a form of English that is used on the web (use of abbreviatons, small letters, absence of punctuation and hyphens, etc.) … webspeak, netspeak, internetese.”

Here is another new one for Internet users. “Wordle,” is “words of a piece of text arranged into a sort of graphic. The more frequent a particular word appears in the text, the bigger its size in the wordle. (Also called word cloud or text cloud."

Those two expressions are not entirely new.   

While it is not possible to stay in tune with all of the continual changes in words, it is interesting and fun to learn a new word every day, or if you have the gift of creative ingenuity, begin to coin some new words of your own.