New words are being made up all the time. Some might be used by one person on one occasion, never to be heard again; others seem to catch on, like yuppie or sound bite, and they spread very quickly throughout the English-speaking world.
It is very rare to find words invented out of nothing. Even computer-generated words like Teflon are not very common; they will also still follow the sound pattern of English. If you had to invent a name for a new oven cleaner, it would not be Bsog.
There are three common ways of creating new words.
Compounding
When two free morphemes are joined together to make a new word, the result is called a compound word. The most common way of compounding is to join a noun with a noun:
| toothbrush, car park, tablecloth, chairperson, lawnmower, teatowel, ladybird, bedroom. |
New Zealand English has many examples of compound words:
| stock route, woodshed, cattleyard, watersider, solo parent, playlunch, chilly bin, lamb's fry, crib-wall, state house, kitset, tarseal. |
Compound words may be written as two separate words (gold rush), or hyphenated (gold-rush), or combined as one word (goldrush). The written form is a matter of convention; the pronunciation and stress pattern are exactly the same.
In everyday speech, we can easily create compound words as we need them, although these will not necessarily be understood outside a specific context.
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This is a Michael Jackson-free zone. Bring me the rabbit plate, please. (a familiar plate with a picture of a rabbit on it) |
Conversion
Conversion is the process whereby a word in one word class is converted into another word class without any change to the shape of the word. It is very common in English.
| The policeman eyeballed the protester. |
Here a noun (an eyeball) has been converted into a verb (to eyeball).
The American psycholinguist Eve Clark gives examples of very young children creating new words by conversion.
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He's keying the door. (from a six-year-old watching someone opening a door with a key) Is it all needled? (from a three-year-old watching some trousers being mended) Will you nut these? (from a six-year-old asking to have some walnuts cracked) |
There are many more nouns in English than verbs, so it is common to find nouns converted into verbs.
Some New Zealand examples include:
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to twink something out; to Xerox some copies; to bach for a while; to dag the sheep; to skite about something. |
Affixation
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Those biscuits are very more-ish. The whole set-up was Mickey Mouse-ish. |
Adding derivational affixes - both prefixes and suffixes — is the most common way of creating new words in English. We can do this easily in casual speech.
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This shirt is unironable. That skirt could be turn-aboutable. |
This does not mean that such a word will catch on and become generally used, though sometimes this can happen.
One of the most common suffixes is -ness, which is added to adjectives to turn them into nouns: happiness, carefulness, goodness, matter-of-factness.
Suffixes are added to the main lexical word classes - noun, verb, adjective, adverb. It is very uncommon to find them added to grammatical words:
| * me+able, * that+ish, * about+ness. |
Each word class has its own characteristic suffixes.
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Noun -> adjective + al, such as national, regional, accidental. Verb -> adjective + able, such as drinkable, likeable, respectable. |
Some words are able to gather more than one morpheme attachment.
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reason + able + ness inter + national + is + ation |
Other methods of creating new words
Acronym (forming a word from the initial letters of a string of words).
Some are given the pronunciation of a normal word:
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ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) HART (Halt All Racist Tours) CHE (Crown Health Enterprise) DOC (Department of Conservation). |
Some are pronounced letter by letter:
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BYO (Bring Your Own) DPB (Domestic Purposes Benefit) GST (Goods and Services Tax). |
Summary of Terms
| morpheme | conversion |
| bound and free morpheme | affixation |
| prefix, stem, suffix | clipping |
| inflection and derivation | blending |
| compounding | acronym |
| compound word |
