Creating Words

I love words. I love saying them, reading them, stringing them together, and even creating them. I think it's funny that we have phrases like "real words" and "made-up words" because all words are both made-up and real. Somebody had to say a word for the first time. At that point, they made it up. A word's meaning is whatever people agree it is, which means that whoever makes up a word usually gets to decide what it means.

As such, I love making up words. Not so much nonsensical words, but words that can be deciphered. A lot of our words can be deciphered if you know the code. Many of our words are simply roots with prefixes or suffixes on them. If you can learn these parts, you can make up tons of words.

For example, what is a photograph? You probably already know, but we can understand it by breaking down the word. 'Photo' means light. 'Graph' means picture. A photograph is a lightpicture, which is the process by which the picture is burned onto the film of a camera.

Now that you know that 'photo; means 'light', you can figure out other words like 'photosensitive' (sensitive to light) or 'photosynthesis' (creating with light). The same is true for 'graph', so you know that a 'polygraph' makes many pictures and a Spirograph is a picture made of spirals. Sometimes, it can be tricky. For example, 'graph' and also be 'gram'. A sonogram is a sound picture and a cardiogram is a heart picture.

Still, with enough parts in your mental library, you can start putting them together and playing with the results. Just using the ones we have here, imagine sonosynthesis. It would mean creating with sound. It may be a made-up word right now, but the concept is not impossible. 'Polysensitive' isn't in the dictionary, but if I used it in a sentence, you could understand that it means that something is sensitive to many things.

You can use this same process with more common constructions. When you add -y to the end of a word, you make it an adjective. Shine becomes shiny. Fat becomes fatty. We can also use -ish to make 'red' 'reddish' and 'punk' 'punkish'. But why stop there? You can make something 'computery' or 'froggish'.

Adding -tion makes something a noun. That's how we turn 'construct' into 'construction'. If we have the word 'hasten', the proper way to turn it into a noun is to say 'hastening'. But if I said 'hastenation', wouldn't you perfectly understand what I was talking about?

The English language has more words in it than any other language on earth. Part of that fact is that we have the luxury of creating words and modifying them to say anything we want. Half the beauty of words is making up the perfect one when it doesn't exist. Using existing words isn't bad to do, but it feels like playing in someone else's sandbox. I may be in the same box, but I'm at least going to add my own sand.