In the previous post, we talked about the process of officially adding new words to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, a process that can take years, even though many new words enter the common spoken language every day as a natural process of language change, or to keep up with changes in society, or perhaps just because people like to play with language and invent new ways of saying things.

Compounding Words

One way of inventing a new word is to take two or more words and put them together. This process is called compounding. Notice that in compound words, the new word may mean something completely different, with no relation to either of the original words:

• greenhouse – a place to nurture plants (not “a house that is painted green”)
• blackboard – a chalkboard or slate (while most are black, some are grey or green)
• wetsuit – a scuba diver’s outfit (not “a suit that got wet”)

A variation of compounding is called blending. In this process, the two words are combined by dropping parts of both words before putting them together. A new word in the OED for 2009 was celebutante, created by blending the words “celebrity” and “debutante” to make a word that describes a famous person who is also part of the wealthy fashionable society class. Some other examples of blending are brunch (breakfast + lunch), telethon (telephone + marathon), smog (smoke + fog), and infomercial (information + commercial).

Redefinition

The virtual world – computers, software applications, the internet, chat rooms, etc. – is changing even more rapidly than the real world, and new terminology is introduced on a regular basis. Quite often, these words are new definitions of existing words that have been adapted to describe new phenomena. As early as 1998, the OED had added a new definition of “spam” – no longer just a canned meat product, spam is now also defined as “irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users.”

In 2009, a new definition of the word zombie was added to the OED. Rather than referring only to a flesh-eating monster from a horror film, it now also means a computer that has been remotely taken over by a hacker, and used to flood another computer system (usually belonging to a bank or other high-profile organization) with so many requests (so much spam!) that the system shuts down.

When you come across a word that’s new to you, take a look at its structure and see if you can identify how it was formed. Do you see a prefix or a suffix added to a root word? Is it a combination of two other words? The Ultimate Vocabulary program provides information on many word origins – and you can always google it!