What’s in a Word?

Legendary Inventions

In 1996, all five members of the board of trustees of the suburban village of North Tarrytown, New York, enthusiastically voted to rename their town Sleepy Hollow. This was almost certainly done in an effort to boost tourism in the wake of the nearby General Motors manufacturing plant closing its doors, leaving many area residents without jobs, instead of because of some newfound affinity for the famous Washington Irving story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which had been published 176 years before that renaming. But that case provides a clear and fascinating example of the made up words of authors having a real and outsized impact on the world. Sleepy Hollow was not a real name before Irving titled his story that and set the story in what was then a fictional village; now it is. His made up name, albeit after nearly two hundred years of extreme popularity and cultural relevance, was able to make the remarkable jump out of the confines of the page and into the real world.

Of course, every single word in every language was made up by somebody at some point. Far rarer though, is when a word can be traced directly back to the work of one writer. Authors and writers make up words far more than I would think the average reader thinks about, and certainly far more than I expected before researching this topic. Although the amount of words that have been invented by writers is indeed impressive, most of them do not make it out of whatever piece of writing they were first relegated to and instead stay there, destined to become only as relevant as the writing they reside in.

What I find far more fascinating, and what I researched for this project in order to gain a better understanding of why and how these words have been created and how they ended up being used, is the words that have been invented by authors for their writing and have went on to become used by real people in the real world, sometimes only for a shorter while after the piece of writing was published but in other cases for centuries afterwards. In many cases, they have become such common members of the English language that most people who use them would probably never think that they have an origin that can be traced back so specifically to one singular writer’s imagination and pen stroke.

                                        “The Sweet Click of Coinage”

Beyond its introduction and conclusion, the book Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers by Paul Dickson mostly serves as a kind of dictionary that lists the definitions and histories of words and phrases that have been created by writers, from “A man got to do what he got to do” from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to “Zombification,” coined by the Romanian-American writer Andrei Codrescu to refer to the process of “soul-sapping popular culture” turning those who consume it into a kind of zombie.

In the introduction to Authorisms, that title itself a word invented by the Puritan minister Cotton Mather in 1702, Dickson begins by listing in chronological order the many writers who have contributed new words to the English language, starting with Geoffrey Chaucer coining such words as bed and bagpipe, continuing to Sir Thomas More, John Milton and of course William Shakespeare, perhaps the author most well known for creating new words for his writing. Many people assume that Shakespeare invented the most English words, and in fact Dickson has a whole section of his book dedicated to this misconception. but as it turns out, Dickson writes that Shakespeare is only credited with inventing 229 English language words. While this is certainly a large amount, and far more than any average writer would be able to invent, it is still far beyond the 342 words invented John Donne, the 558 of Ben Johnson and the ultimate 630 new words that were invented by John Milton.

Dickson also makes sure to mention that many authors who are credited with inventing new words, like Mark Twain, Bret Harte and even Shakespeare himself, were instead merely the first to write down words that had already been in use. While this is certainly still a historically important feat, it is also an important distinction to make and when studying these types of words it is important to recognize that for many words that were supposedly invented centuries ago, like those of Shakespeare, we may never truly be able to know whether they came from the author’s own mind or if they instead were the first to write down an existing word.

Elsewhere in the introduction to Authorisms, Dickson writes that “Writers have long enjoyed their ability to create new words, to neologize—to write, read, and hear—what writer Arthur Plotnik, who has written on the subject of neologism in literature, calls the ‘sweet click of coinage’ and which he terms one of the rewards of the vocation.” As a very amateur writer myself, I find this to be an incredibly powerful sentiment. Perhaps just by virtue of being writers, of having the natural talent for writing well, the best writers are also endowed with the ability to create new words on top of the ideas, thoughts, emotions and feelings that their writing can also create. That ability, “one of the rewards of the vocation” for those talented enough to indulge in it, seems to me to be a transformational and perhaps overlooked element of the act of producing writing.

                                                       What’s In a Word?

For my own qualitative research on the subject of words that have been, as far as we know, invented by authors, I aimed to reach beyond just the more basic understanding of the fact that we know many words have been invented by writers over the centuries that English language literature has existed and developed. For this research I first started out by simply googling “words invented by writers.” From there I looked at several different online articles that listed out common and uncommon words that we know with certainty, or think to the best of our historical knowledge, have been invented by writers for their writing.,,,,,

There were some surprising words on these lists that I previously had not known were created by writers, such as chortle, pandemonium, boredom and scientist, although I tried to have a mix of more common and well known words as well as more esoteric ones or words that have fallen out of fashion in the current day. I then picked out 40 different words from these various lists and looked at the origin of each in the Oxford English Dictionary to verify that their first usage was when the articles said it was, and when they said the writers had first published them. After that I decided on different research questions related to this topic and those words that I would code data for.                                           

The first question I decided on was looking at what type of words these invented words are, or what part of speech they are a part of. Out of my limited number of words, I went through each and again verified what part of speech they were using the Oxford English Dictionary. What I found was that the vast majority of the words that had been invented by authors that I looked at for my research were of one part of speech, the noun. Out of my 40 words, 38 of them counted as nouns, although this was complicated by several words being able to be used as either nouns or another part of speech like adjectives or verbs. In the case of the word freelance, a word invented by Sir Walter Scott for his novel Ivanhoe in 1819, that particular invented word counted as a noun, verb and adjective all at once, depending on usage.

For these words I decided to count them for each part of speech they could come from, although only eight of the words I looked at had this ability to come from multiple different parts of speech. After nouns, the only other parts of speech that the words I looked at came from were adjectives, with 7 entries, and verbs, with 4 entries. I also looked at how many of these words were compound words, where a writer simply took two existing words and put them together to create a new one, and that category ended up having a small but still significant number of 16 entries.

It seemed interesting to me how, by far, the largest number of these invented words were nouns. But when thinking about that fact, it does not totally seem surprising. Because nouns are used to identify physical things, places and people, I do understand why authors might find it most useful and compelling to invent new nouns. The earliest writing was used to simply record things in the real world, to keep a record of transactions and histories. I see it making perfect sense then that that spirit of early writing as a way to simply describe the world would carry on into the psyche of writers, leading them to invent new nouns at a far faster pace than other parts of speech.

The next question I used to look through the words that I had and code the data for them was looking at what type of writing the words came from. I went through the same process of looking through the words on the online articles and looking up what piece of writing they were from, as well as using the Oxford English Dictionary to verify their written origins. In this category I found far more diversity than I had for the question of what part of speech the words came from, with seven different categories of the type of writing instead of only three different parts of speech. There was still one category that was clearly above the others, with novels and other works of fiction taking the number one spot at 17 entries out of the 40 words. However, the rest of the words were far more spread out and there was not a second place category far above the others. Words that originated in works of poetry were in second place with 7 entries, but works of non fiction, with 6 entries, and plays, with 5 entries, were close behind. Beyond that, I also found 2 instances each of words being invented by writers for works of satire or comedy and for letters, and one instance of a word being invented by a writer for a pamphlet.

That novels and other fictional writings, followed by poetry, were where the largest number of invented words came from was not surprising to me. After all, it stands to reason that in fictional work and poetry there is more freedom to be creative and play with language in a way that I would think other writing would not allow you to do nearly as much. But the fact that there did end up being so much diversity in the type of writing the invented words came from is fascinating in a different way. That writers have also been creative enough to invent new words that went on to become heavily used in writings that I think of as being far less creative, like letters and non fiction writing, shows a perfect example of the incredible creative spark that writers have in the act of creating a new word.

The next question that I had was whether the words that I had picked to look at and analyze had changed in their meaning over time from the writer’s initial intended meaning in whatever piece of writing they invented the word in. After all, while many of the words that I looked at were from more recent pieces of writing, many other words came from works that had been written centuries ago, so I thought it was important to look at if and how the meaning of the invented word has changed over time.

There was again a kind of lopsidedness in the answer to this question that I coded data about, like in the question of what parts of speech the words came from. 29 of the 40 words had not changed in their meaning from when they were originally written by the author, again according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s page on the origin and transformation of each word over time. 13 of the 40 words did change in their meaning from what the author had originally intended the word to mean, although much like with the question of what parts of speech the words came from there was again overlap, with the words blurb and freelance both continuing to have the same meaning from their origins in writing and also having taken on another alternate meaning over the years.

That so many of the invented words keep their original meaning from when they were invented, sometimes centuries ago, shows the incredible staying power that popular writing can have. I doubt that many of these writers, when they first wrote down their invented words, expected that element of their creation to last for so long and continue to stay in usage even long after their work became less relevant. Yet, that surprising achievement ended up being the most common course that the invented words took over their lifespans.

The final two questions that I conducted qualitative research on had more directly to do with the real world usage of the words that I had picked. Looking at the several different online articles that I used to find my 40 words that had been created by authors, I found it interesting how most of them, even the ones that featured only seven or ten words, seemed to all have differing words that they offered the reader. I wanted to find out how many words had overlap between the different articles that I had looked at, and compare that to how many unique words the articles featured. I simply looked through the articles that I had found my words from and looked at the entirety of the words they listed and tallied how many words came up in more than one of the articles. I did not just limit this question to the 40 words that I used for my other research questions, but instead looked at the entirety of the different articles’ listed words, which came to 83 words in total. I found that I was correct in noticing how the articles all came up with different words that had been invented by authors, as only 13 of the words had overlap between multiple articles and the overwhelming majority of 70 words were unique, only showing up in only one of the articles.

I find this quite interesting just from the perspective of it clearly showing just how many different words have been created by authors over the years. I only looked through the very small number of six articles that I could easily find from an internet search, barely scratching the surface of the research on this subject and of how many words writers have truly invented. Yet, even just from this small sample, the great majority of words were unique, and almost all of the articles each had their own unique made up words to offer to the public.

For my final question, I looked at the popularity of the 40 words that I had picked to conduct research on. I looked at two elements of the usage of the words: whether the usage of the words had grown or shrunk over time and whether the words became popular after being published or only caught on in popular usage much later in time. I wanted to look at these questions because while I did try to include both words that I thought were popular and those that I thought were not, I did not actually know the details of the popularity of the words that I had picked. To find this out, I looked at the Google Books ngram viewer, which allows a user to type in a word and see a graph of when that word was most popular over a set time period.

I then decided that I would set a limit of 20 years to determine the popularity of a word. If a word had continually grown in popularity for the last 20 years or more, or if it had been less than 20 years since the peak usage of a word, I counted it as having grown in popularity from when it was first published. If a word’s popularity had shrunk over the last 20 years or if there had been a more than 20 year decline since its peak usage, I counted it as having shrunk in popularity. If there was a rise in a word’s usage less than 20 years after it had been published that was not surpassed but a separate rise later in time, I counted it as becoming popular soon after being published, and if it did not see a rise for more than 20 years after first being published, I counted it as having taken longer to become popular. Some words had a small rise in popularity soon after first being published, but afterwards came down to near zero usage and only grew in popularity at a later time. For these words, I discounted the initial rise because it was usually much surpassed by their later rise. I counted them as not having become popular after they were first published, because they hadn’t, relative to the later rise they experienced.

This data ended up being far more balanced than it had been for nearly all my other research questions. More of the words had grown in popularity and then shrunk, with the popularity of 25 of them growing. However, the number of words that had shrunk in popularity was still significant, with 15 of the words having gone down in popularity for at least 20 years. For the question of when they first became popular, the data was even more balanced and ended up being nearly identical. Out of my 40 words, 19 had their biggest rise in popularity within 20 years of being published, and 21 of them had their first rise or had a bigger rise in popularity more than 20 years later.

There were also some surprising inclusions in every category of this research question, and I believe that the results show how the evolution of different words can be tricky to look at, and that the usage of words often doesn’t take the trajectory that seems the most likely. I would not have guessed that usage of the word tween would have shrunk a significant amount from its peak usage about 12 years after first being published in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1937. Nor would I have thought that common words like blatant would have reached their peak usage long after being less popular for a time and coming back into fashion, or that the word luggage, one of the most commonly used words I looked at, would have grown only a small amount from when it first started to become popular, instead of having a relatively steady rise in popularity.

                                    Conclusion: Frindle and the Nature of Invention

Learning about these various elements of invented words, how they did or did not become popular, when they were invented and what type of writing they were invented for, can lead one to wonder exactly what the point of it all is, of why any new words are invented. In the epilogue to Authorisms, Paul Dickson writes further about the very concept of author created words, and our societal understanding of them. He writes of the tremendous difficulty writers can have in actually getting their made up words accepted by editors and dictionaries, saying that  “…the fact is that the mission of these lexical guardians is not to please writers but to serve a language.” I find that to be a fantastically beautiful statement about the act of creation and being creative, perhaps far more so than Dickson truly intended it to mean. I relate to that sentiment in the sense that if I complete a piece of writing that I enjoy or think I have written well, there is little outside concern for me other than that of whether I enjoy it. Although I of course hope for them to, the idea that other writers and readers may not enjoy it as much as I do is just not something that generally crosses my mind in any significant way. But maybe, through all the time that I have been writing, I have instead been serving a higher purpose with my writing, that of adding something new to the world in order to further “serve” an unimaginably old language. Serving it unintentionally and without choice, just by the act of creating writing.

I do not think that I am a creative enough person to be able to create any new word that would gain traction and real world usage. I don’t say that in any disparaging way, but more as an acceptance of my limitations as a writer. I am not Nick Allen, the main character of the wonderful children’s novel Frindle, who decided on a whim to start calling pens by that book’s titular invented word just to spite his teacher. I greatly enjoy writing, but I am also perfectly content to stick with the words that have already been added to the English language. But after completing this project, I also cannot help but look at all words differently, to wonder when and where and how they were thought up, and which ones may have come from the minds of writers.

I don’t think the concept of inventing a new word is even anything that I can imagine doing myself. As Dickson says later in the epilogue, “The point of all this being that even writers with large readerships have a tough time getting their clever nonce words accepted. On the other hand, Sinclair Lewis never intended to have the title of his most famous novel turned into a word: Babbit.” By the strange quirks of popularity, many, many writers push for their invented words to be accepted by the public but never achieve their goal, while others unintentionally invent words that go on to become staples of the cultural lexicon.

Perhaps that feeling, that drive that I feel I am missing, is not the creativity of being able to invent a new word, but more of a lack of an explicit desire to want to achieve such an addition. Maybe one day, if I keep writing long enough, I too will end up inventing a new word that goes on to enter real life usage. And perhaps by doing that, I would not only be serving the English language. Instead I see that imagined remarkable achievement as calling into something larger than myself, of both working with but still not being bound by the current day limitations of English, something instead akin to the language serving me as a canvas for creation.