ABSTRACT
Where do new words come from? In the last unit we looked at words borrowed from other languages, and in this unit we are going to look at how new words have been created from old. However, you may be wondering about words that are completely original creations, words that have no roots. The fact of the matter is that these are few and far between. One estimate is that below half a per cent of new vocabulary over the last 50 years is original. Googol – the word for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros – is an example. It was brought into the world by a nine-year-old boy, Milton Sirotta, when his father, the mathematician Edward Kasner, asked him for a suitable name for that number (it later inspired the name of the internet search engine google.com). Some rootless words are supposed to have been created to represent sounds – they are echoic or ONOMATOPOEIC. Cuckoo is the classic example and there are many others (e.g. bleep, honk, bang). Rootless words tend to crop up in literary texts, particularly fantasy and science fiction, but they rarely move into common usage, exceptions perhaps being hobbit and triffid. The point is that the vast majority of words have some kind of etymology – they have roots.
