Where Do New Words Come From?

New words can come into being in a variety of ways. The speakers of one language, for example, might borrow terms from another if there is no one-word equivalent for a particular concept, as was the case for schadenfreude (from German) and safari (from Swahili and Arabic).

English has been enthusiastic both as a donor and a recipient, and this helps to account for its large vocabulary.

In other cases, speakers and writers simply make up words to suit their purposes. If a term is used just once in this way, it’s called a nonce word (as in the phrase "for the nonce," or for a particular purpose). And if the nonce word catches on, it may graduate to the status of a new word, or neologism, in the language.

Many nonce words may not even appear in dictionaries.

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These newcomers, however, aren’t always welcome, and such terms may be viewed as nonstandard or colloquial for years or decades before they become respectable members of the lexicon. Guesstimate, for example, has been in use for over 80 years and is still considered fairly informal by many.

And even the passage of time provides no guarantee of acceptance, since the great majority of neologisms never become popular. Instead, they are relegated to unabridged dictionaries or are lost entirely as the language—and its speakers—move on.

Authorial Inventions

One prolific creator of nonce words was Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). Some of his coinages have become part of the language (as in chortle, a portmanteau of “chuckle” and “snort”). Others are well known from his writings but have never broken through into widespread usage (slithy, frabjous).

And the title character from his 1876 poem, The Hunting of the Snark, has become a stand-in for any type of imaginary creature. (A different sense of snark, meaning sarcastic criticism, has a separate origin story.)

Another rich source for nonce words is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Ever since its publication in 1939, it has bewildered both critics and readers, in part because of the thousands of newly coined words that it contains. Examples include meandertale (a portmanteau of “meander” and “tale”) and yawnscripture (a seeming reference to sleep-inducing religious texts).

The breakout term from Joyce’s experimental work, however, is quark, which appears in the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark!" This nonce word was plucked from obscurity and repurposed in 1964 by physicist Murray Gell-Mann to refer to a type of subatomic particle. He was drawn to the term, in part, because there were originally three classes, or “flavors,” of quarks (dubbed up, down, and strange).

Every generation seems to have its own compendium of neologisms. For some baby boomers, this includes grok—a word invented by Robert Heinlein for his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Originally a transitive verb, grok—which appears nearly 500 times in the story—refers to understanding something or someone at a very deep and intuitive level.

Heinlein’s novel was highly influential in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, and this term seemed to embrace both the spiritual and psychedelic aspects of insight. In 2023, grok gained a new lease on life when it was appropriated by Elon Musk’s xAI as the name of its generative AI chatbot.

Mistakes and Memes

In other cases, nonce words are the result of a mistake. The G. and C. Merriam Company, for example, added the word “dord” to its 1934 New International Dictionary as an abbreviation for “density.” This was a misreading of a citation slip that was inscribed with “D or d.”

And on May 31, 2017, Donald Trump sent out a tweet that stated only “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” It is believed that this was a typo for “coverage,” but covfefe has taken on a life of its own and still turns up in news stories about the president and his predilection for communicating via social media.

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At the other end of the age continuum, members of Generation Alpha—those born after 2010—are beginning to make their mark on English’s vocabulary. The most notorious coinage of Gen Alpha may be skibidi, from Alexey Gerasimov’s viral YouTube videos about murderous toilets with human heads (really).

As a term, the meaning of skibidi is highly contextual. Although it is defined as “nonsensical (and occasionally pejorative)” by Merriam-Webster, the dictionary's editors suggest that it is “mainly used for humor, expressive, and ironic effect.”

In this way, skibidi is much like lol—originally, textspeak for “laugh out loud,” but which is now employed in a variety of ways: as an interjection, a verb, an acknowledgement, or as a marker for sarcasm.

Language and Identity

A fascinating aspect of language change is that it’s difficult to predict which new terms will thrive and which will not. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, for example, enjoyed a burst of popularity in 1964 when it was used in a song for the film Mary Poppins (in which it is defined—rather unhelpfully—as meaning "exactly what you want it to"). It has largely joined a host of other dated terms of approbation—like tubular, rad, or groovy—that mark the speaker as being a person "of a certain age."

Our linguistic identities are shaped by the words that we adopt as well as by those that we refuse to use or regard with contempt. As a result, any language is in a state of constant flux, with younger speakers sometimes pushing it in new directions that are not always welcomed by their elders. The only linguistic constant, it seems, is change.