difficulties in treating new words like new sentences. A novel word (like
handbook or partial) may attract unwelcome attention to itself and appear
to be the result of the breaking of rules rather than of their application.
And besides, the more accustomed to the word we become, the more likely we
are to find it acceptable, whether it is ‘grammatical’ or not – or perhaps
we should say, whether or not is was ‘grammatical’ at the time it was first
formed, since a new word once formed, often becomes merely a member of an
inventory; its formation is a historical event, and the ‘rule’ behind it
may then appear irrelevant.
What exactly is a word? From Lewis Carroll onwards, this apparently simple
question has bedeviled countless word buffs, whether they are participating
in a game of Scrabble or writing an article for the Word Ways linguistic
magazine. To help the reader decide what constitutes a word, A. Ross
Eckler[13] suggests a ranking of words in decreasing order of
admissibility. A logical way to rank a word is by the number of English-
speaking people who can recognize it in speech or writing, but this is
obviously impossible to ascertain. Alternatively, one can rank a word by
its number of occurrences in a selected sample of printed material. H.
Kucera and W.N. Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-day English[14]
is based on one million words from sources in print in 1961. Unfortunately,
the majority of the words in Webster's Unabridged[15] do not appear even
once in this compilation – and the words which do not appear are the ones
for which a philosophy of ranking is most urgently needed. Furthermore, the
written ranking will differ from the recognition ranking; vulgarities and
obscenities will rank much higher in the latter than in the former.
A detailed, word-by-word ranking is an impossible dream, but a ranking
based on classes of words may be within our grasp. Ross Eckler[16] proposes
the following classes: (1) words appearing in one more standard English-
language dictionaries, (2) non-dictionary words appearing in print in
several different contexts, (3) words invented to fill a specific need and
appearing but once in print.
Most people are willing to admit as words all uncapitalized, unlabeled
entries in, say, Webster's New International Dictionary, Third Edition
(1961). Intuitively, one recognizes that words become less admissible as
they move in any or all of three directions: as they become more frequently
capitalized, as they become the jargon of smaller groups (dialect,
technical, scientific), and as they become archaic or obsolete. These
classes have no definite boundaries – is a word last used in 1499
significantly more obsolete than a word last used in 1501? Is a word known
to 100,000 chemists more admissible than a word known to 90,000 Mexican-
Americans? Each linguist will set his own boundaries.
The second class consists of non-dictionary words appearing in print in a
number of sources. There are many non-dictionary words in common use; some
logologists would like to draw a wider circle to include these. Such words
can be broadly classified into: (1) neologisms and common words overlooked
by dictionary-makers, (2) geographical place names, (3) given names and
surnames.
Dmitri Borgmann[17] points out that the well-known words uncashed, ex-wife
and duty-bound appear in no dictionaries (since 1965, the first of these
has appeared in the Random House Unabridged). Few people would exclude
these words. Neologisms present a more awkward problem since some may be so
ephemeral that they never appear in a dictionary. Perhaps one should read
Pope's dictum "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last
to lay the old aside."
Large treasure-troves of geographic place names can be found in The Times
Atlas of the World[18] (200,000 names), and the Rand McNally Commercial
Atlas and Marketing Guide[19] (100,000 names). These are not all different,
and some place names are already dictionary words. All these can be easily
verified by other readers; however, some will feel uneasy about admitting
as a word the name, say, of a small Albanian town which possibly has never
appeared in any English-language text outside of atlases.
Given names appear in the appendix of many dictionaries. Common given names
such as Edward or Cornelia ought to be admitted as readily as common
geographical place names such as Guatemala, but this set does not add much
to the logological stockpile.
Family surnames at first blush appear to be on the same footing as
geographical place names. However, one must be careful about sources.
Biographical dictionaries and Who's Who are adequate references, but one
should be cautious citing surnames appearing only in telephone directories.
Once a telephone directory is supplanted by a later edition, it is
difficult to locate copies for verifying surname claims. Further, telephone
directories are not immune to nonce names coined by subscribers for
personal reasons. A good index of the relative admissibility of surnames is
the number of people in the United States bearing that surname. An estimate
of this could be obtained from computer tapes of the Social Security
Administration; in 1957 they issued a pamphlet giving the number of Social
Security accounts associated with each of the 1500 most common family
names.
The third and final class of words consists of nonce words, those invented
to fill a specific need, and appearing only once (or perhaps only in the
work of the author favoring the word). Few philologists feel comfortable
about admitting these. Nonce words range from coinages by James Joyce and
Edgar Allan Poe (X-ing a Paragraph) to interjections in comic strips
(Agggh! Yowie!). Ross Eckler and Daria Abrossimova suggest that
misspellings in print should be included here also.
In the book “Beyond Language”, Dmitri Borgmann proposes that the
philologist be prepared to admit words that may never have appeared in
print. For example, Webster's Second lists eudaemony as well as the entry
"Eudaimonia, eudaimonism, eudaimonist, etc." From this he concludes that
EUDAIMONY must exist and should be admitted as a word. Similarly, he can
conceive of sentences containing the word GRACIOUSLY'S ("There are ten
graciously's in Anna Karenina") and SAN DIEGOS ("Consider the luster that
the San Diegos of our nation have brought to the US"). In short, he argues
that these words might plausibly be used in an English-language sentence,
but does not assert any actual usage. His criterion for the acceptance of a
word seems to be its philological uniqueness (EUDAIMONY is a short word
containing all five vowels and Y).
The available linguistic literature on the subject cites various types and
ways of forming words. Earlier books, articles and monographs on word-
formation and vocabulary growth in general used to mention morphological,
syntactic and lexico-semantic types of word-formation. At present the
classifications of the types of word-formation do not, as a rule, include
lexico-semantic word-building. Of interest is the classification of word-
formation means based on the number of motivating bases which many scholars
follow. A distinction is made between two large classes of word-building
means: to Class I belong the means of building words having one motivating
base (e.g. the noun doer is composed of the base do- and the suffix -er),
which Class II includes the means of building words containing more than
one motivating base. They are all based on compounding (e.g. compounds
letter-opener, e-mail, looking-glass).
Most linguists in special chapters and manuals devoted to English word-
formation consider as the chief processes of English word-formation
affixation, conversion and compounding.
Apart from these, there is a number of minor ways of forming words such as
back-formation, sound interchange, distinctive stress, onomatopoeia,
blending, clipping, acronymy.
Some of the ways of forming words in present-day English can be restored to
for the creation of new words whenever the occasion demands – these are
called productive ways of forming words, other ways of forming words cannot
now produce new words, and these are commonly termed non-productive or
unproductive. R. S. Ginzburg gives the example of affixation having been a
productive way of forming new words ever since the Old English period; on
the other hand, sound-interchange must have been at one time a word-
building means but in Modern English (as we have mentioned above) its
function is actually only to distinguish between different classes and
forms of words.
It follows that productivity of word-building ways, individual derivational
patterns and derivational affixes is understood as their ability of making
new words which all who speak English find no difficulty in understanding,
in particular their ability to create what are called occasional words or
nonce-words[20] (e.g. lungful (of smoke), Dickensish (office), collarless
(appearance)). The term suggests that a speaker coins such words when he
needs them; if on another occasion the same word is needed again, he coins
it afresh. Nonce-words are built from familiar language material after
familiar patterns. Dictionaries, as a rule, do not list occasional words.
The delimitation between productive and non-productive ways and means of
word-formation as stated above is not, however, accepted by all linguists
