Raise your hand if you have ever made a vocal utterance and someone responded, “That’s not a word.” I have. I had an English teacher once who circled words in one of my papers and wrote “Not in my dictionary.” This brings up a very interesting yet not easily resolved issue: what makes a word? This is a gnarly and labyrinthine topic about which whole doctoral dissertations have been written. I find it fascinating because I am consistently surprised how often it comes up in every day life. The purpose of this essay is not to propose any theses or potentially conclusive definitions; the purpose is simply to report a few of my current thoughts on the matter.
First, I would like to respond to my English teacher. Dictionary entries do not have a one-to-one correspondence with existing words. While it is certainly true that every entry in any dictionary is a word, it is completely wrong to assume that every word in a given language occupies a dictionary. Dictionaries contain words based on the selections of board members. The board members’ goals in selecting a word are two-fold: 1) to define accurately the words in a language; and 2) to uphold the reputation of the dictionary that they represent. Some dictionaries are notoriously conservative (such as Merriam-Webster), others are traditionally liberal (like Oxford), and still others are concerned primarily with etymology and word history (American Heritage).
For example, the current (11th) edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary contains just over 165,000 main entries, whereas the most recent (2005) edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains just over 301,000 (not to mention the Oxford Dictionary online, which contains over 1 billion!). So if my English teacher had owned Merriam-Webster and I had owned Oxford, it could be that the words she circled were among the 136,000 not even listed in hers. Understandably, though, dictionaries have to draw the line somewhere because there are logistical limitations to publication. A dictionary in the form of a physical book must be comprised of a finite number of pages (and in some cases volumes), and an online dictionary is limited by the efficacy of the data-entry folks plugging information into the system. But the number of words in a language is only limited (at least in principle) by the memories of its speakers.
Another major problem that is relevant to this discussion is how to actually count words. Do grammatical inflections constitute new words or just inflected forms of a single word? For instance, a verb like “go” may be inflected in the following ways in Standard American English: go (infinitive, first person, second person, plural), goes (third person singular), going (progressive), went (past), and gone (participle). Are go, goes, going, went, and gone five words, or is go one word with five inflected forms? If the latter, then it must be agreed that “went” is not a word; it is an inflected form of “go.” I have a lot of trouble conceding on this basis that “went” is not a word. How about “high,” “higher,” “highest,” or, better yet “good,” “better,” “best,” which hardly bear resemblance? Is each of these a word in its own right? Again, if the answer is no, then it must be that “best” is not a word, but instead is the superlative form “good.”
Related to the word-counting problem are identical vocalic outputs with different meanings. Words that are pronounced the same but that have different definitions abound in English! Open any dictionary to a random page and you will find nearly every word to have at least two definitions. Often one vocalic output will even cross the boundaries of lexical category such as “water” (the noun – what you drink) and “water” (the verb – what you do for your plants). The reason I say “vocalic output” is because spelling should only be taken into account in order to clue in to a word’s etymology. “Read” and “reed” are spelled differently and have the same pronunciation and different meanings, but “cap” (what you wear on your head) and “cap” (what you close a bottle with) are spelled the same, pronounced the same, and have different meanings. The thousands of languages that don’t have a writing system don’t encounter this problem at all, but still must have words that are pronounced the same but that have different meanings.
The way I see it, each word should correspond to exactly one definition, at least for the purpose of counting. This allows the counter to embrace the natural fact that identical vocalic outputs may have different meanings, and avoids the notion that one word can have multiple meanings. Therefore “cap” meaning the head-covering is a word, and “cap” meaning a bottle-covering is a completely different word that happens to have the same vocalic output. Similarly “water” the noun is a word, and “water” the verb is an entirely different word. I would also go so far as to extend this to inflections (other linguists, please don’t freak out on me here). “Go” and “goes” are two different words, not inflected forms of the same word. Each of these has a specific, though very similar, definition, and each is only used in a particular grammatical context. It can surely be agreed that “go” and “went” do not mean the same thing.
In the end, therefore, dictionaries are not much help in deciding what makes a word. They are merely variable representations of some of the words in a language at a given point in time. New words pop up quite often, and with the help of the media, are able to spread through the populace far faster than any dictionary can keep up. New words and phrases are called neologisms. Whether it’s a new product or an advance in technology, neologisms are not infrequent, and if you’re not paying attention, you might miss them. 30 years ago, nobody knew about the Internet, but very few people in developed nations don’t know about it today. No one would dispute that “internet” has become a full-fledged word in its own right with a fairly specific meaning (and not just “the net inside”). The computer world is flush with such examples: blog, podcast, firewire, firewall, wi-fi, e-mail, laptop, download, spam, google, and countless others. (Incidentally, my spell-checker didn’t recognize half of those I just listed, which tells you something – can you guess which ones?)
The fact that these neologisms are new, and also the fact that they are specific to a particular domain of our culture, does not make them any less words. Hardly anyone would deny that millions of people know the meanings of these words and use them on a regular basis. But why should it matter that millions of people use them? Does the number of users of a word dictate its wordliness? (By the way, my spell-checker does not recognize “wordliness.” Does anyone reading this have any trouble whatsoever understanding what is meant by it? I doubt it.)
Certainly a large of number of users of a vocal utterance lends weighty credence to it being considered a word. But surely many of the neologisms in use today were invented by one person or a few people, who began to use them in their appropriate contexts, and eventually their usage became so common and frequent that the trail from “single user” to “millions of users” was obscured. A five-year-old, for instance, who is fully adept at Internet travel, would have no reason to assume that the word “internet” is a recent phenomenon, and may furthermore be shocked to learn that the Internet did not exist when his or her parents were children. Many if not most of this child’s friends will likely know about the Internet, just as they know about other English words such as “ball,” “car,” and “poop.”
So the number of users of a vocal utterance that carries meaning is a poor criterion for determining whether it is a word because no one can pin-point a number of users required for a vocal utterance’s graduation into wordliness. It is impossible to say, “A million people use it, so it is a word,” or, “5000 people use it, so it is a word.” Moreover, it is impossible to say, “Only 100 people use it, so it is not a word,” or even, “Only 1 person uses it, so it is not a word.” It is not even legitimate to say, “Zero people use it, so it is not a word,” for reasons I will get to later.
Actually, I’ll get to those reasons now. Language is in constant flux. Contrary to what many grammarians (like my old English teacher) would have us believe, every language is dynamic and is always evolving. No natural language in recorded history has remained unchanged for more than a hundred years. Just as new words are continually born, so do other words continually die. The history of English is loaded with examples of words that were either replaced (often by more socially prestigious words) or that simply fell out of use. These words are often called archaisms. Ever read Chaucer or Shakespeare? All sorts of words can be found in the works of these poets that no one uses anymore – and the great few who venture their use do so exclusively for the purpose of kindling the essence of archaic language for literary effect or academic example.
A few of these words include: “lemman” (lover), which may be a compound of “lay” and “man,” as in the “the one you lay (and presumably sleep) with; “witing” (knowledge), which has been reduced in Modern English to “wit” and has adopted a slightly modified meaning; “anon” (at once), which my spell-checker happens to know (thank you, Bard); and “betwixt” (between), which some people may remember from the nursery rhyme relaying the tale of Jack Spratt and his wife, who, betwixt them both licked the platter clean.
The first two of these come straight from Middle English as written by Chaucer in 1380 or so. Probably not a single person uses these words in natural speech. Surely people use them, because scholars and students read from The Canterbury Tales. Also, they must use a word in order to talk about it, but no one sits around at a bar and says, “So, your lemman seems pretty smart. She likely has a lot of witing.” The second two words are perhaps slightly more permissible to speakers of the modern language. “Anon” is so prevalent in Shakespeare that many educated people at least know its approximate meaning, although I would speculate that very few use it in natural speech. “Betwixt” is not entirely unheard of, largely thanks to the idiom “betwixt and between,” which for all practical purposes means “between and between.” The fact that no one uses these words is not enough to claim that they are not words, but it is enough to conclude that they aren’t words in Modern English. (The line that separates stages of a language, such as Old English/Middle English/Modern English is also a blurry and disputable topic, and a subject to which just as much discussion could easily be devoted, so I will abstract away from that quagmire for now.)
It is germane at this time to raise the issue of slang. When faced with neologisms of popular culture, and especially of youth, many traditionalists are inclined to cursorily dismiss them as slang words. This tendency is unfortunate for a number of reasons. First, it instantly diminishes their legitimacy as words. Second, it ignores the solid fact that language is vibrant and flexible. Third, it undermines the authority of what may be the most reliable, dependable, and important source of language evolution: young native speakers.
The fundamental idea of slang is difficult to support first because of the lack of any consistent and workable definition of it, and second because of the inability to establish the point at which so-called “slang words” become genuine words – and vice-versa. Words characteristic of any generation like “groovy,” “bummer,” “righteous,” “awesome,” “sweet,” “bogus,” “radical,” “whack,” “far out,” “wicked,” “hot,” “cool,” “tight,” and “sucks” are often called slang without notice of the fact that each of these words was a non-slang word in English long before it developed a modern context. Furthermore, certain of these words are so prevalent in regular use that their original “slang” connotation has become tangential or non-existent. My mother, for instance, would not hesitate to refer to something she enjoys as “cool,” and neither would I, and my children, upon hearing both their father and grandmother use the word in identical contexts, may require some effort to gleam that “cool” was ever considered non-standard in the language, at least in the context implying goodness and positivity.
The incipience of so-called slang is ultimately a product of the ability of native speakers (usually) to mine the enormous vault of existing words in a language and make selections that seem appropriately apt to assume a new definition. It is backwards thinking to suppose that this type of word formation constitutes a retrogression of the language, or that words so formed are somehow less authentic than words with a clear and traceable etymological lineage.
As a linguist (and a descriptivist), I am more comfortable treating slang as functionally no different from every other type of neologism. In this sense, words traditionally thought of as slang are better thought of as new words that may (or may not) be endemic to a particular age group, geographic region, socio-economic stratum, drug using culture, or any of the other innumerable divisions into which the human populace may be segmented.
Inter-lingual mingling in culturally diverse communities is yet another hearty source of neologism formation, primarily due to word borrowing and lexical blending. This is true not only between two or more disparate languages, but also between various dialects of a single language. (The distinction between language and dialect is yet another of the many intangible concerns of linguistics; dialects exist on a continuum of gradual differences which eventually manifest as unintelligible to speakers at some geographic (or other type of) distance.)
Around 60% of the words in modern English would not exist in their current form had the Norman French not invaded England in 1066. The subsequent influx of forced marriages, new government, and overall Norman culture in many cases simply replaced words of Germanic origin, and in other cases more subtley Frenchified existing words. As a result, English now contains words like “parliament,” “avenue,” “renaissance,” “river,” “language,” “ocean,” “message,” and thousands more. No one can dispute that these are fully legitimate words in the modern language. But they had to start somewhere. No doubt when it first infiltrated Germanic-only English, there were plenty of folks who considered the language of their conquerors to be coarse, ugly, offensive, and having no rightful place in the mouths of their loved ones (as well as others who saw it as a prestige language and aimed to incorporate it as much as possible, especially if they desired to climb the social ladder). In time, however, the French influence persisted and we are left with the enormous quantity of modern English words with French ancestry.
It is the same today in English-speaking nations that feature contact situations between languages. Aboriginal and Pacific Island languages in Australia, Irish and Scots Gaelic in Britain, Afrikaans and Swahili in South Africa, and Middle and South American Spanish in the United States are each influencing the English in those countries to various degrees, whether people like it or not.
In the U.S., Spanish words such as “bueno,” “mañana,” “adios,” “fiesta,” “amigo,” “comprendo,” and “problemo” can be heard often among Latino and Gringo English speakers alike. “Problemo,” incidentally is not even a word in Spanish; the correct word is “problema” because the grammatical gender of the noun is feminine, so it must take the feminine noun ending “a” instead of the masculine noun ending “o.” The fact that native English speakers say “problemo” contributes still more evidence to the fact that language is always changing in spite of the grammarians’ attempts to solidify and control it. If native English speakers use such words in normal speech, then the words should be considered part of the English lexicon, even though they are relatively recent developments.
The core of the discussion thus far has been to delineate a few of ways in which new words come into a language and to attempt to expose various potential misconceptions about the reality of modern English. But the point I would ultimately like to make in light of these realities, is that neither I nor anyone else should be criticized by anyone for not limiting my speech (or writing) to the domain of already existing words. Inventing new words is a perfectly fair use of my abilities for creative power as a native speaker, and I refuse to feel guilty for not submitting to words that are already part of the lexicon.
However, it is important to mention that the invention of words should not be done in a random, haphazard fashion because they won’t mean anything to anyone except, perhaps, the inventor (and maybe not even then). What I mean is this: the word “wordliness,” which I apparently invented while writing this essay would have been completely nonsensical as some arbitrary collection of sounds. I could have selected “fratopore,” for example, to mean “wordliness,” but this would not have made any sense unless it were explained, and then my readers would be burdened with remembering the definition of some strange word that is not composed of any recognizable units.
Composing words of recognizable units involves a branch of linguistics called morphology. Morphologically speaking, “wordliness” is made up of three morphemes, each of which is already known and recognizable by most native English speakers, even though they may not realize it. The first morpheme is the noun: “word.” The second morpheme is the adjectival suffix “-ly.” This is recognizable because it exists on various other adjectives such as “sickly,” “portly,” and “stately.” Since this is followed by another morpheme, the spelling adapts as “-li.” The third morpheme is “ness,” which converts the adjective “wordly” into a noun meaning the state of being wordly. No one should have any problem instantly understanding the meaning of “wordliness” because it is composed of morphemes that practically everyone recognizes. Furthermore, anyone could, after hearing “wordliness” form his or her own sentence of the constituent parts, such as: This word is very wordly because of its high level of wordliness.
By following the rules of building salient combinations of morphemes, one can invent all sorts of words that make absolute sense to any native speaker. For instance, I can call something “craptastic,” “unbueno,” or “mintalicious” (or even “Fergalicious”) without batting an eye. I can describe the flavor of something as “raisiny,” “cerealy,” or “bananaey.” I can form new nouns like “wordliness,” “ugle,” “grossity,” or “omnisuckence.” The possibilities are endless.
If you would like to share a word that you have coined, please post a comment to this blog.
