Around the turn of the year, lists of ‘new words’ and ‘words of the year’ always appear. What stands out: all those words are based on existing words. Depieting is derived from Pieter (Pieter Omtzigt). Condom fatigue and skimpflation are combinations of existing Dutch words. Brain rot and maganomics: words that already existed in English. And the new verb shazamming is derived from a brand name. Shazam is an app that can recognize music fragments.
Do new words ever appear that cannot be traced back to existing words?
In 2008 swaddle chosen as word of the year. It suddenly circulated on the internet, in the curious sense of ‘tapping something with half an erection’. For a moment, the specialists thought that this was a form that could not be traced back to something that already existed. Until that turned out to be the word somewhere in Flanders a century ago swagger had already been recorded before, in the sense of ‘moving unsteadily back and forth’.
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According to Vivien Waszink of the Dictionary of New Words New words that are not based on existing words are extremely rare. She knows two examples in English. In 1938 the word was coined by an American nylon invented. Its first syllable (nyl-) does not refer back to anything existing. But the second syllable is not completely new: there were already more substance names ending in -on at the time.
And then there is the word blurb‘a short text of recommendation on a book cover’, invented by an American humorist in 1907. The letter combination was chosen by him purely at random, based on the sound. It might as well have been a nonsense word in a nursery rhyme.
Nicoline van der Sijs, specialized in the history of Dutch vocabulary, gives another example: googlel. That means ‘ten to the hundredth power’. Here too the sounds are completely random. The word was coined by the nine-year-old nephew of a mathematician.
The one once invented by Marten Toonder mink might also be an example. The word part -kukel was chosen purely on the basis of its sound. But of course the prefix min- already existed, for example in contemptuously.
Doesn’t look like anything
Van der Sijs notes that there are many brand names that resemble nothing. Odido for example. “The intention there is for them to be unique. So that when people Google they always end up on that brand and not on a competitor with a similar name.”
According to Van der Sijs, the fact that we hardly make any really new words in everyday language has mainly to do with our memory. “If you base a word on an existing word, it fits in with our knowledge, we can easily remember it, and we can also easily transfer it to someone who does not yet know the word.” You can also see it this way: words don’t like to be alone. In the dictionary in our heads, the mental lexicon, words are always in larger networks, with words that resemble them in shape or meaning.
Van der Sijs: “Compositions and derivations are transparent. You can remember it immediately. And borrowed words, like maganomicsoften already have a complete context, for example words that also end in -nomics. So when you hear something new with -nomics, you immediately understand: it belongs to those other words.”
And perhaps it is a nice thought that language always builds on what is already there.