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Jan 16, 2013 · We use it to express ourselves through speech, to record our experiences or to invent and tell stories in writing. But before all that begins, before a word leaves our lips or a pen hits the page, we use language in our heads. This code we share is more than a “simple naming process.”.
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The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet's go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms. It is professional enough to satisfy academic standards, but accessible enough to be used by anyone.
Check out the Mysteries of Vernacular series: https://ed.ted.com/mysteries-of-vernacularView full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/where-do-new-words-come-...
- 6 min
- 1.4M
- TED-Ed
- How New Words Are Formed
- Borrowing
- Shortening Or Clipping
- Functional Shift
- Back-Formation
- Blends
- Acronymic Formations
- Transfer of Personal Or Place Names
- Imitation of Sounds
- Folk Etymology
An etymologist, a specialist in the study of etymology, must know a good deal about the history of English and also about the relationships of sound and meaning and their changes over time that underline the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family. Knowledge is also needed of the various processes by which words are created within Moder...
A majority of the words used in English today are of foreign origin. English still derives much of its vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but we have also borrowed words from nearly all of the languages in Europe. In the modern period of linguistic acquisitiveness, English has found vocabulary opportunities even farther afield. From the period of the...
Clipping (or truncation) is a process whereby an appreciable chunk of an existing word is omitted, leaving what is sometimes called a stump word. When it is the end of a word that is lopped off, the process is called back-clipping: thus examination was docked to create exam and gymnasium was shortened to form gym. Less common in English are fore-cl...
A functional shiftis the process by which an existing word or form comes to be used with another grammatical function (often a different part of speech); an example of a functional shift would be the development of the noun commute from the verb commute.
Back-formation occurs when a real or supposed affix (that is, a prefix or suffix) is removed from a word to create a new one. For example, the original name for a type of fruit was cherise, but some thought that word sounded plural, so they began to use what they believed to be a singular form, cherry, and a new word was born. The creation of the t...
A blend is a word made by combining other words or parts of words in such a way that they overlap (as motel from motor plus hotel) or one is infixed into the other (as chortle from snort plus chuckle — the -ort- of the first being surrounded by the ch-...-le of the second). The term blend is also sometimes used to describe words like brunch, from b...
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a phrase. Some acronymic terms still clearly show their alphabetic origins (consider FBI), but others are pronounced like words instead of as a succession of letter names: thus NASA and NATO are pronounced as two syllable words. If the form is written lowercase, there is no longer any formal c...
Over time, names of people, places, or things may become generalized vocabulary words. Thus did forsythia develop from the name of botanist William Forsyth, silhouette from the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a parsimonious French controller general of finances, and denim from serge de Nîmes(a fabric made in Nîmes, France).
Words can also be created by onomatopoeia, the naming of things by a more or less exact reproduction of the sound associated with it. Words such as buzz, hiss, guffaw, whiz, and pop) are of imitative origin.
Folk etymology, also known as popular etymology, is the process whereby a word is altered so as to resemble at least partially a more familiar word or words. Sometimes the process seems intended to "make sense of" a borrowed foreign word using native resources: for example, the Late Latin febrigugia (a plant with medicinal properties, etymologicall...
May 5, 2023 · There are modern-day English word origins that come from Japanese, Zulu, Ukrainian, Sanskrit, Polynesian and Māori. Loanwords, or words borrowed from other languages, exist in just about every language.
Jul 3, 2019 · Where Do Words Come From? New words have entered (and continue to enter) the English language in many different ways. Here are some of the most common methods.
Oct 9, 2019 · The process of fashioning new words out of old ones is called derivation. Here are six of the most common ways in which news words are created.
