Let’s Make Up Some Words!

I’m sure we can all remember learning in our high school English classes that Shakespeare invented somewhere in the ballpark of a gazillion words we still use to this day. Frugal, obscene, skim milk, zany just to name a few and we all cringe when someone uses catch-22 incorrectly. English is a great language for making up words and phrases (although, don’t tell that to the more uppity Strunk & White).

But besides Shakespeare, there are plenty of other wordsmiths out there creating many of our words. For example, NERD which is brought to you by Dr. Seuss from If I Ran the Zoo or CHORTLE from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. 

Dictionary.com has an interesting short slideshow with “nine novel English neologisms.”