Every year, about 1,000 new words are added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
and how do they make it into our everyday lives?
With over 170,000 words currently in use in the English language,
it might seem we already have plenty.
new ideas and inventions spring forth,
our existing words leave gaps in what we want to express
and we fill those gaps in several ingenious,
and occasionally peculiar ways.
One way is to absorb a word from another language.
English has borrowed so many words over its history
that nearly half of its vocabulary comes directly from other languages.
Sometimes, this is simply because the thing the word describes
Rome and France brought legal and religious concepts,
like altar and jury, to Medieval England,
while trade brought crops and cuisine,
But sometimes, another language has just the right word
for a complex idea or emotion,
Scientists also use classical languages to name new concepts.
Clone, for example, was derived from the Ancient Greek word for twig
to describe creating a new plant from a piece of the old.
And today, the process works both ways,
with English lending words like software to languages all over the world.
Another popular way to fill a vocabulary gap
is by combining existing words that each convey part of the new concept.
This can be done by combining two whole words into a compound word,
or by clipping and blending parts of words together, like spork,
And unlike borrowings from other languages,
these can often be understood the first time you hear them.
And sometimes a new word isn't new at all.
Obsolete words gain new life by adopting new meanings.
Villain originally meant a peasant farmer, but in a twist of aristocratic snobbery
came to mean someone not bound by the knightly code of chivalry
A geek went from being a carnival performer
to a specific type of awkward genius.
And other times, words come to mean their opposite through irony,
like when sick or wicked are used to describe something literally amazing.
But if words can be formed in all these ways,
why do some become mainstream while others fall out of use
or never catch on in the first place?
Sometimes, the answer is simple,
as when scientists or companies give an official name to a new discovery
And some countries have language academies to make the decisions.
But for the most part, official sources like dictionaries
New words don't originate from above, but from ordinary people
spreading words that hit the right combination
coined in the 1970s by sociobiologist Richard Dawkins
from the Ancient Greek for imitation.
He used it to describe how ideas and symbols propagate through a culture
like genes through a population.
With the advent of the Internet,
the process became directly observable in how jokes and images
were popularized at lightning speed.
And soon, the word came to refer to a certain kind of image.
So meme not only describes how words become part of language,
And there's a word for this phenomenon of words that describe themselves:
Not all new words are created equal.
Some stick around for millennia,
but the way these words are created
and the journey they take to become part of our speech
tells us a lot about our world and how we communicate within it.