Names of authors become descriptive words as well, such as “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” from Franz Kafka and James Orwell, respectively.Ĭharacters from famous books are also sources of new words, such as ”pollyanna,” (overly optimistic), ”scrooge” (selfish) and ”quixotic” (idealistic, romantic, unrealistic). The title of the novel “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller became an often-used phrase to describe a circumstance that is too difficult such that there is no escape in sight because the conditions are reciprocally conflicting. For example, the word ”quark” came from “Finnegan’s Wake” by James Joyce, while ”cyberspace” came from William Gibson’s “Neomancer.” Neologisms are words that can come from several sources. They are called neologisms, which were manifested around 1772. Still others create new words by combining different parts. Some words are formed by changing some parts of speech. Many of them come from existing words with new meanings given.
#New words of the day series#
Very few words are invented by coining from a series of sounds that are chosen randomly. But if you think about it, where do new words come from? Formation of new words We take words for granted because we have been hearing and using them since birth. Merriam-Webster also reports that the English vocabulary contains between 750,000 and one million words. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (3rd Edition, Unabridged) has about 470,000 entries, which is similar to the entries in Oxford Dictionary. Still many more are included in the 20-volume dictionary. In the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 171,476 words that are currently in use are included, together with 47,156 words that are obsolete.