Oxford picked 'big society' as Word of 2010 over vuvuzela and Boris bike. The shortlist is a case study in how English coins, blends and borrows new words.
Posts with tag.: Untranslatable Words
A presidential word contest drew 2,123 proposals from 593 Estonians; the winner, taristu, replaces the borrowed infrastruktuur and enters the dictionary as a real Estonian word.
A primary school principal in Izmir has recorded 4,500 Romani words from three neighbourhoods, building the first Turkish-Romany dictionary from scratch.
Shanzhai and fangnu made it into the new Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. Two entries, 670,000 words, and a quiet record of what China has been worrying about.
The OED holds millions of coined words that never caught on, from furgle to wibble, and the reason they failed has nothing to do with quality.