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.: neologism
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.
Recyclopath, vegangelical, congreenient: ten green coinages from Urban Dictionary, what they reveal about environmentalism, and why translators dread them.
David Crystal says the web did not accelerate language change so much as expose it, and the texting panic collapses once you count the words.
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.