The Grammarian – How English words reinvent themselves…

Where Do Words Come From?

New words have entered (and continue to enter) the English language in many different ways.

Here are some of the most common:

Borrowing

Although most of our vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek (often by way of other European languages), English has borrowed words from more than 300 different languages around the world. Here are a few examples:

futon (from the Japanese word for “bedclothes, bedding”)
smorgasbord (Swedish, literally “bread and butter table”)
slogan (alteration of Scots slogorne, “battle cry”)

Clipping or Shortening

Some new words are fairly obvious shortened forms of existing words:

indie from independent
exam from examination
flu from influenza
fax from facsimile

However, some very common words have less obvious beginnings.

mob from ‘mobile vulgus’ meaning a fickle crowd
Goodbye, a shortening of ‘God be with you’
Hello, a shortened from of the Old English ‘whole be thou’

Acronyms

A more extreme version of shortening.

Radar – radio detection and ranging
Laser – light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
scuba – self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
quasar – quasi-stellar radio source

Compounding

A new word may also be created by combining two or more existing words:

fire engine
babysitter
wristwatch

Luckily, English tends not to take compounding to the extremes, unlike German where long and unwieldy words are commonplace.

However, the vagaries of English mean that even the positioning of the words changes the meaning.

houseboat, boathouse
basketwork, workbasket
casebook, bookcase

Prefixes & Suffixes

The ability to add affixes, whether prefixes (such as com-, de-, ex-…etc) and suffixes (-ence, -ment, -ness…etc) makes English extremely flexible.

This process, referred to as agglutination, is a simple way to completely alter or subtly revise the meanings of existing words, to create other parts of speech out of words (e.g. verbs from nouns, adverbs form adjectives, etc), or to create completely new words from new roots.

Blends

A blend (also called a portmanteau word) is a word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two or more other words.

moped, from mo(tor) + ped(al)
brunch, from br(eakfast) + (l)unch
electrocute, from electr(ic) and (exec)ute

Conversion or Functional Shift

New words are often formed by changing an existing word from one part of speech to another.

Innovations in technology have encouraged the transformation of nouns into verbs:

Google
microwave
Hoover

Transfer of Proper Nouns

Sometimes the names of people, places, and things become generalized vocabulary words.

Maverick was derived from the name of an American cattleman, ‘Samuel Augustus Maverick’
Saxophone was named after ‘Sax’, the surname of a 19th-century Belgian family that made musical instruments
Boycott was named after ‘Charles Boycott’, the shunned Irish land agent for an absentee landlord

Neologisms or Creative Coinages

Now and then, new products or processes inspire the creation of entirely new words, some of which have endured.

quark (coined by novelist James Joyce, and later adopted by physicists to name a sub-atomic particle)
galumph (Lewis Carroll, another prolific wordsmith),
aspirin (originally a trademark)

Imitation of Sounds

Words are also created by onomatopoeia, naming things by imitating the sounds that are associated with them:

boo
bow-wow
tinkle
click

January 4, 2016/1 Comment/by Matt Wright