What Is a Neologism? New Words and How They Get Accepted

Languages have a limited set of mechanisms and most new words come from a few of them. Compounding joins existing words, which is the most productive route in English and the reason so many new terms are two familiar words stuck together. Derivation adds prefixes and suffixes to existing stems, generating words that feel established immediately because the parts are. Blending fuses parts of two words. Borrowing takes a word from another language, which English has done to an unusual degree. Clipping shortens a longer word, and initialisms reduce a phrase to letters that may then be pronounced as a word. Conversion shifts a word to another part of speech without changing its form, which happens constantly and passes unnoticed. Outright invention from nothing is rare and mostly confined to product names and to literature.

Survival depends on factors that have little to do with how good a word is:

• •Filling a genuine gap, since a word naming something that had no name spreads and one duplicating an existing word does not
• •Transparency, since a word whose meaning can be guessed from its parts requires no explanation
• •Ease of pronunciation and of inflection, since a word that resists taking a plural or a past tense is inconvenient
• •A community that uses it regularly, since words spread through repeated use rather than through approval
• •Neutrality, since a word that carries an obvious attitude dates quickly as the attitude does
• •Timing, since a word attached to a passing phenomenon disappears with it

Individual coinages that survive are rarer than popular accounts suggest, and the documented cases are worth distinguishing from the mythical ones. Writers have contributed genuinely, though the attributions to Shakespeare are routinely overstated, since the dictionary evidence records the earliest surviving written use rather than the invention and a great many of those words were presumably already spoken. Scientific and technical fields coin deliberately and successfully, since a new phenomenon needs a name and the community adopts it by necessity. Fiction has supplied several words that escaped their books, including terms for surveillance, for a self-fulfilling institutional absurdity and for robotic workers. Brand names become generic often enough that companies employ lawyers to resist it. The pattern in successful cases is that the word named something people needed to talk about and had no other way to name.

Inclusion in a dictionary is widely treated as a word becoming official and works nothing like that. Lexicographers record usage rather than authorise it, monitoring large collections of text for words appearing with reasonable frequency, across varied sources, over a period of years, and with a stable meaning. A word meeting those criteria is included whether anyone approves of it or not, and one failing them is excluded however elegant it is. The process is therefore descriptive, and the common complaint that a dictionary has legitimised an objectionable word misunderstands what the entry means. Removal happens too, with obsolete words moved out of smaller editions to make room. Some languages have academies that do attempt to regulate vocabulary, and their record suggests that official disapproval slows adoption modestly and prevents it rarely.

Complaints about new vocabulary are as old as records of the language and follow a consistent pattern worth recognising. The specific objections raised, that a word is ugly, unnecessary, illogical or foreign, have been made about words now regarded as unremarkable, and the same complaints recur each generation about whatever is current. The underlying reaction appears to be about unfamiliarity rather than about the words, since people rarely object to new terms they learned in childhood however irregular those are. That said, some objections have content, since a word can be genuinely ambiguous, can displace a more precise existing term, or can be a euphemism doing concealing work, and those are criticisms of what the word does rather than of its novelty. Distinguishing the two kinds of objection is the useful move, and it is rarely made.

Compounding, derivation, blending, borrowing, clipping and conversion produce nearly all new words, and invention from nothing is rare. Survival depends on filling a real gap, being guessable and having a community that uses it repeatedly, not on quality. Attributions of coinage to individual writers are generally overstated, since dictionaries record earliest surviving use rather than invention.