English Etymology: Where do New Words Come From?
Living languages are never static — they never stay the same over long periods of time. They interact with other languages, shift, adapt, and develop. This includes the vocabulary of a language: some words fall out of use, other words change their meaning and, of course, new words appear.
Etymology is the linguistic science that investigates the origins of a word. Including its relationships with words in other languages, and its historical development in form and meaning. Etymologists study modern languages, as well as historical written records dating back hundreds of years. They can answer the question of how a word appeared in the English language.
In this article, we will take a look at some of the main sources of new words.
1. Borrowing
A borrowed word (or loanword) is a word that has been adopted from a foreign language, often with little or no modification. This is a natural process that happens when two languages ‘interact’, for instance, through geographical proximity or international trade.
Some adoptions have come by a very circuitous route! Take, for example, the word orange. It originated with the Sanskrit naranj or naranga or narangaphalam or naragga, which became the Arabic word naranjah and later the Spanish word naranja. It entered English as a naranj, changed to a narange, then to an arange and finally an orange.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
— James D. Nicoll
There are a lot of borrowings from multiple languages in the English language. Some sources say that English has borrowed from as many as 120 languages! Some of these languages are Greek, Latin, French, Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and many more. Here are just a few examples:
- from French: Ballet, cafe, entrepreneur, delinquent, genre, lingerie, diet, Renaissance and adultery!
- from German: Anglo, delicatessen, waltz, rucksack, bankrupt, cottage and gothic
- from Yiddish: Glitch, bagel, nosh and schlong!
- from Spanish: Guerrilla, macho, patio, plaza, anchovy and bonanza
- from Chinese: Gung-ho, tofu, typhoon, ketchup and tea
2. Affixation
Many words in English have been formed by adding suffixes and prefixes to the root words.
A suffix is a letter or group of letters added at the end of a word which makes a new word.
| words | suffix | new words |
| forget, use | -ful | forgetful, useful |
| state, govern | -ment | statement, government |
| complicate, create | -ion | complication, creation |
Prefixes are letters added to the beginning of a word to make a new word with a different meaning. Prefixes can, for example, create a new word opposite in meaning to the word the prefix is attached to. They can also make a word negative or express relations of time, place or manner.
| base word | prefixed word | type of meaning |
| possible | impossible | opposite |
| able | unable | opposite/negation |
| payment | non–payment | negation |
| war | pre–war | time (before) |
In fact, this is probably one of the most ‘obvious’ ways of forming a new word. Suffixes and prefixes usually have fixed meanings and are ‘visible’ in the word. For instance, words like ‘happiness’ or ‘disappear’ — you can easily figure out how they were formed, and from which root words. Affixation can be used to create both formal and ‘slang’ (colloquial) words.
3. Back-formation
Back-formation is a process opposite to the affixation: creating a new word by removing a supposed affix from an existing one. For instance, by removing the ending of the word ‘enthusiasm’ we get the verb ‘enthuse’.
Back-formation usually follows established grammatical rules, which makes this way of making new words fairly predictable.
4. Shortening
Shortening (also called clipping, or truncation) creates new words by omitting a significant part of the original. For example, ‘influenza’ becomes ‘flu’. Shortening can even reduce word combinations to one short word: ‘zoological garden’ becomes ‘zoo’.
5. Functional shift
The term functional shift, or conversion, describes the process where a word converts from one syntactic category — that is, word class or part of speech — to another without any change to the form of the word. Thus, the noun ‘eye’ becomes the verb ‘to eye’ (eg. “he kept his eye on the dog” » “he eyed the dog suspiciously”), and the verb ‘to visit’ results in a corresponding noun, ‘a visit’. (eg. “we visited Helen last year” » “it was a lovely visit”)
6. Blending
Blending means merging together the shapes and meanings of two (and sometimes more) words. The original words may overlap, for example, motor lodge + hotel became motel. Other blends occur without overlaps, such as breakfast + lunch which blended together became brunch, and biography + picture became biopic.
Some blended words are so accepted that we’ve forgotten the blend! For example, blood + rushing = blushing or horrible + tremendous = horrendous.
Many slang words are created this way. For example, chill + relax = chillax, and friend + enemy = frenemy!
7. Compounding
Compounding might seem similar to blending, but in this case a new word is formed by joining together two or more full words, not parts of them. For example, birdcage, moonlight, football, and so on.
8. Drift
The meanings of words drift or change over time. By some estimates, over half of all words adopted into English from Latin have changed their meaning in some way over time, often drastically. Such as handsome which meant ‘easily-handled’ (and was generally derogatory). A more modern example is the changing meaning of gay from merry to homosexual (and as a derogatory term, in some circles, to silly or bad).
Some words have changed their meanings many times. Nice originally meant stupid or foolish; then, for a time, it came to mean lascivious or wanton; it then went through a whole host of alternative meanings (including extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating and dainty), before settling down into its modern meaning of pleasant and agreeable in the late 18th Century.
9. Errors or typos!
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries (most of them thankfully quite obscure) that owe their existence purely to typographical errors or other mistakes. There are many words, often in quite common use, that have arisen over time due to mishearings. These include, shamefaced from the original shamefast, penthouse from pentice, and buttonhole from button-hold. More recently, we’ve gained misunderestimate from former President Bush and refudiate from Sarah Palin! Perhaps even covfefe will be a word one day!
Final thoughts
These are some of the most common ways in which new words appear in the English language. However, they are by far not the only ones. Some other ways of creating new words include acronymic formations (‘radar’), transferring personal or place names (‘denim’), imitating sounds (‘hiss’), and many more…