When do words, become words?

Hyburnate

Hyburnate

Hyburnate

Soldato
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Excuse the really confusing title, but when does a word become an acceptable word?

Of course the English language is very old, and new 'slang' is found each and every day, but how does something become acceptable?

If you look into many words you find they first appeared in a book in year XXXX, so how do these days, words become words?

It's worth saying, I am fully sober I am just incredibly curious :)
 
Last edited:
Hyburnate said:
So.. who decides? Can we bodge the system and get something in? :p
Click to expand...

first you need a word that qualifies and it would need to be incredibly good

and even if you were successful, you would never get the credit. It would be stolen and claimed by the people with enough influence or power to spread it prolifically enough to get adopted as a word.
 
1. If memory serves, Latin is used as a base language to form new English words, past and present. An example of this is when a new periodic table element is discovered and Latin is used to derive a name for the new element.

2. Then words evolve into new words or get joined together e.g. cannot to can't.

3. Slang words become the norm such as 'cool' (meaning good) or vape (meaning e-cigarette).

4. Loanwords, mainly pinched from French. Cafe, restaurant, tariff, verify, premier (as in Premier League), and colours such as blanche, noir, rouge, brunette.
 
It depends on what you're using for your definition of a word, what dictionary. IIRC the legal profession and a majority of academia use the OED as the main authoritative source so a word would be accepted into that based on these criteria...

Oxford English Dictionary

The OED is the definitive record of the English language, featuring 600,000 words, 3 million quotations, and over 1,000 years of English.
www.oed.com www.oed.com

Oxford English Dictionary

The OED is the definitive record of the English language, featuring 600,000 words, 3 million quotations, and over 1,000 years of English.
www.oed.com www.oed.com
 
Words/expressions are coming into existence and disappearing so fast that a fairly rigid lexicon isn't going to capture it anymore, plus it absolutely doesn't capture the use of emojis.
 
The French have a mechanism for this, which is hilarious. The Academie Francaise. Basically, if a new thing is invented they create a word like. For example, the computer is an ordinateur.

en.wikipedia.org

Académie Française - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

But, they can't turn the tied of slang and natural language development; the French will call computers whatever they want.
 
Words also evolve into different meanings, naturally or by being adopted. The format of the engish language with recognisable patterns of vowels and consonants means that many words are unrecognisable or unpronounceable to our tongue.
 
There is an excellent, and very readable, book ("The Meaning Of Everything") about how the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived and published.

It was the first 'modern' dictionary. Previous dictionaries gave meanings of words, while the OED provided history (including earliest identified use) and quotations (showing examples).

It took around 70 years to complete and was published in blocks, so you'd get a couple if letters (a-c) every few years.

It was also crowd sourced- thousands of volunteers hunted out quotations and sent them in on postcards.
 
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