Six Ways to Create New Words
Have you ever experienced textpectation? According to the Urban Dictionary, that's "the anticipation one feels when waiting for a response to a text message." To a linguist, textpectation is an example of a blend or (in Lewis Carroll's more fanciful phrase) a portmanteau word. Blending is just one of the many ways that new words enter our language.
In fact, most new words are actually old words in different forms or with fresh functions. This process of creating new words out of old ones is called derivation--and here are six of the most common varieties:
- Affixation
Over half the words in our language have been formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to root words. Recent coinages of this type include semi-celebrity, subprime, awesomeness, and facebookable. - Back Formation
Reversing the process of affixation, a back-formation creates a new word by removing an affix from an already existing word, for example liaise from liaison and enthuse from enthusiasm. - Blending
A blend or a portmanteau word is formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two or more other words, such as bromance (a combination of brother and romance), pixel (picture and element), staycation (stay and vacation), and flirtationship (flirt and relationship). - Clipping
Clippings are shortened forms of words, such as blog (short for web log), zoo (from zoological garden), and flu (from influenza). - Compounding
A compound is a fresh word or expression made up of two or more independent words: office ghost, tramp stamp, breakup buddy, backseat surfer. - Conversion
By this process (also known as functional shift), new words are formed by changing the grammatical function of old words, such as turning nouns into verbs: accessorize, party, gaslight, viagrate.
To learn more about where our words come from, visit Introduction to Etymology: Word Histories. And if you'd like to share a favorite neologism or two, please click on the "comments" button below.
More About Word Histories:
Comments
Richard, I love the tidbits you unearth and dust off for us to enjoy! Simply becoming more aware of how language is being used, and growing– “morphing”– in delightful ways every day!
By the way, is the verb “morph” an example of both clipping and conversion (endomorph, ectomorph… just morph)? Or is it a back formation + conversion from a word like “morphology”?
Or might there be an obscure writer for children’s television whose etymology hobby brought a Latin etymon more than a thousand years into the future and into the hearts and minds of millions of children today?
Thank you for your note. The noun “morph” (meaning “a skin disease” in the 17th century;
a morphine addict in the early 20th century; and more recently, in linguistics, a “discrete phonological unit”) has been around for some time, but the verb “to morph” (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) made its first appearance only 25 years ago. So in that sense it could be a case of conversion. But I prefer your theory involving that obscure writer for children’s television. All the best!
Pretty well described. However I need a reference. Do you know anything scientific about creating new words like the ones above?
It is fascinating how languages evolve and adapt to territorial and generational dialects. I, for one, often adjust words to suit a moment or phrase…. examples…
Planetaries – actually a word, but not when used as a plural noun to refer to planets and things resembling planets, such as Pluto.
Observationists (new to me at the time, and not a dictionary word that I can find, but after a quick “google” I find that it used by many) used as a noun referring to those that observe.