Birthing words

George Orwell

Writers use words, of course, but they also invent words, as George Orwell did with such terms as big brother, newspeak and thought police. The title of his book Nineteen Eighty-Four itself became a part of the language.

William Shakespeare was the king of invented words. His plays brought hundreds of words into the English language, including lackluster, compulsive, excitement, eventful, priceless and frugal. Lesser writers have done their part, as well.

Henry Hitchings documents many of the contributions of writers to word creation in his book The Secret Life of Words. Here are some that he mentions:

Chaucer — accident, intellect, galaxy, famous

Bible translator William Tyndall — larceny, feasible, endowment, advertisement

Francis Bacon — versatile, prescient, ignorable, acoustic, juvenile

Ben Jonson — strenuous, retrograde, defunct

Philip Sidney — bugbear, hazardous, loneliness, pathology

Thomas Hobbes — complaisance

Robert Burton — feral, hirsute, literati, meteorologist

Fanny Burney — tea party, grumpy, shopping

Laurence Sterne — lackadaisical, muddle-headed, sixth sense, whimsicality

Sir Walter Scott — winsome, guffaw, faraway, uncanny, wizened, kith and kin

It is possible, of course, that some of these words were already used in speech at the time and that these writers were simply the first to put them in writing. Scholars who study these things cannot very well trace word origins back to conversations that took place centuries ago, but they can discover when certain words first appeared in books, or even in some cases letters, magazine articles or newspaper articles. And so writers like Bacon, Burton and Burney, whose works have survived the passage of time, get the credit for birthing all those words into the English language.