Words coined by famous people

Factual Questions
1

What words were coined by famous people? Especially if the people were famous for something other than being an author or word coiner. (Is anyone famous just for coining words? I don’t think so.)

The most famous word coiner I know of is Thomas Jefferson, who coined dime, although he spelled it “disme” (the S was silent).

Other non-authors:

Physicist Paul Dirac coined both boson and fermion.

Jean-Baptiste Lamark, most famous for his incorrect theory of evolution, is credited with coining invertebrate

William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, coined asteroid

Enrico Fermi, another physicist, coined neutrino

Ernest Rutherford, yet another physicist, is credited with proton

Thomas Henry Huxley, early supporter of Darwin, coined agnostic

OK, the above is heavy with scientific terms, but that’s mostly because such terms’ orgins are better documented (usually in a scientific paper) than your run-of-the-mill words. There’s various large groups of scientific terms, such as chemical elements, chemical compounds, minerals, scientific names of plants, animals, and microorganisms, etc. which were sometimes named by famous scientists, but I’m not really interested in those.

You can name famous authors’ coinages if you want. Some that I can think of off-hand are hobbit by Tolkien, chortle, jabberwocky, galumph and perhaps others by Lewis Carroll, cyberspace by William Gibson, nymphet by Nabokov, utopia by Sir Thomas More, grok by Heinlein, and lilliputian, brobdingnagian, yahoo by Jonathan Swift. I’m sure there are many others.

Final note: you may have heard somewhere that Shakespeare coined some large number of words, usually a few thousand[sup]1[/sup]. Well, whoever told you that was giving out misinformation. What that was based on was that Shakespeare was the earliest citation in the OED for that many words. But having the earliest citation is not the same as coining the word. It’s quite possible that Shakespeare didn’t coin any words at all.
[sup]1[/sup] The number credited to Shakespeare has steadily declined as earlier citations have been discovered. No doubt a graph of this number over time would give us a prediction of when it will go to zero. Except that I expect the number will only approach zero asymptotically.

2

Is anyone famous just for coining words?

Quiz ? This word has the rare distinction of being a word coined owing to one persons intent to coin a word !. He succeed quite well.

antidisestablishmentarianism ? Not as useful as quiz, but still, its there, its arguably more famous, and it wasn’t coined by someone remembered for anything else.

3

Thomas Jefferson coined “neologize”.

4

Murray Gell-Mann didn’t invent “quark,” Joyce did (in a new meaning itself), but Gell-Mann made the thing/word thing.

The word is in the opening sentence of a poetic introduction opening Book II, Chapter IV (Viking Ed, 384). It is Joyce’s redefinition, to his ear, of the sound of seabirds with an adaptation of “squawk.” The birds circle in the air gossiping about what they see.

The chapter works with the myth of Tristan and Isolde. Tristan has been mustered by his master King Mark to fetch Isolde to be his bride.

— Three quarks for Muster Mark!

After the poem is finished, the prose begins with the same picture:

Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans.
The winging ones. Seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel
and capercallzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold
when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.

It’s nice that “quark” echoes the orthography of both “muster” and “Mark.”
The full passage (Tristan bags her for himself):

     — Three quarks for Muster Mark!	
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark	
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.	
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark	
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark	
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmer-	
    stown Park?	
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!	
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark	
And you think you're cock of the wark.	
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark	
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her	
Without ever winking the tail of a feather	
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!
5

William Whewell (who may not be very famous now, but was in his day), coined the words scientist, physicist, and probably ion, anode, and cathode (amongst others), all in the first half of the 19th century.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the verb to visualize (also in the early 19th century).

6

And hemorrhoid. (OK, not really.)

7

Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness”, which has become part of the lexicon and is in Merriam’s dictionary.

8

It occurs to me that the source of the word “quark,” when explained–mentioning the “squawk” part–is cited in nearly every lay introduction to physics and has captured the public ear like few other etymologies.

The etymology of “quark,” this permanent member of the lexicon (relatively rare in contemporary neologisms) can only be elucidated using the full sentence of Joyce. I have never seen the correct etymology outside Joyce studies. Or happily figured out by non-published readers, of course.

9

For *Paradise Lost *Milton coined “pandemonium,” describing Hell, with its population of all (“pan”) demons.

10

“Gas” (J.B. van Helmont, Flemish scientist)
“Catalyst” (J.J. Berzelius, Swedish chemist)
“Robot” (K. Capek, Czech writer)

11

Quark is a German word, meaning milk curds. I don’t know if either Joyce or Gell-Mann knew this, bit I would not be surprised if they did. They were both language buffs.

12

Except that story is now considered an urban legend. “Quiz” was first attested to in the 1780s and meant “to mock.” It didn’t mean “to ask questions” until 1843, and is considered to be influenced by “inquisition.”

We know the person who coined the word “Googol,” but he’s only famous for that.

Robert Heinlein coined “waldo” for a device to manipulate things by remote control, in a story by that title. I don’t know if the term is still in use today, though.

“Serendipity” was coined by novelist Horace Walpole.

13

Yes, of course. That’s why I opened the post saying that Joyce invented the word “with a new meaning itself.”*

The milk product has no bearing on the etymology, although in the spirit of all’s fair in Wake glosses, have at it if you think you can come up with one.

What’s interesting is that the near-super human fluidity with which Joyce plays with words, in so many languages, is that people assume not only that he was aware of, but employed all possible meanings of every word and phrase and their sound association in creation.

Of course, that very fluidity is what allows new insight and pleasure in exploring Joyce’s meaning and the reader’s creative response to it–such as what you may come up with “quark,” as I suggested above.

In fact, a game Wakeans play (I forget what it has been dubbed) is to find, and make bullshit glosses, on words that didn’t exist nohow nowhere when the Wake was written. For example, the word “Emalia” appears, usually glossed as a play on Emilia, the character in Othello (why the name is changed is not important here). But it has joined the list of pre-figurations by Joyce.

I have often thought about, and may publish yet, the idea in literature criticism the idea of Joyce as the Hebrew God of creation. Case in point: a hoary and holy exegetical practice in Judaism is the freedom to connect every and any word in the Bible to each other. Why? Since the Torah is from God, is perfect, meaning among other things no word would be used by Him in it if something could not be gleaned from them. This exegetical freedom includes using sound changes (easy enough when you consider that the Torah, like modern Hebrew, has precious few vowels)–from it’s first name of “Adam” (“earth/dirt”) as well as and puns, a practice Rabbi Jesus was fond of, “Petrus” (“stone”). (In the case of Petrus Jesus made the connection clear.)

At base is that God’s literate/literal framework of existence is of profound significance: the Book–written text–is the vehicle for the very existence of God’s created reality, or of God himself (later specifically conflated with nonliteracy with Christians’ conception of Logos).

For good reason the idea of “Midrash as literature” flourished in the 1980s as French lit crit had its fluorescence. Derrida has a (typically irresponsible) essay on Joyce and the Torah. (Joyce is the happy hunting ground for post-modern crit “all meanings are good cuz I say so.”)
*This reply, by using a cite quote, makes it sound more aggressive/defensive than it is. Not meant, just habit of scholarly reply. Which indeed often is aggressive/defensive. :slight_smile:

14

About neologisms, and their permanence. Words coined in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics usually are permanent by their very nature (by this I am allowing even words like “phlogiston”)–atoms and molecules are permanent and their reference with consistent words is a help in STEM. “Truthiness,” even granting that it is a permanent quality of, I don’t know, societies and discourse, and has now been discovered and named, can without as much of a problem be referred to by circumlocution.

I’ve heard that English has far more words than any other language because of the STEM words. True?

It is a kind of having your cake and eating it claim, because “diethylhydroxylamine” is a French word too, I presume. This seems like an interesting question; I’m sure linguistics people study it and have a word for it (:)).

15

Did he coin this? I thought it was an existing Czech word.

16

For many years, I believed that Warren Harding had coined the word “normalcy”. Luckily I checked Wikipedia and learned that he probably didn’t coin it, although it wasn’t a common word when he used it in his campaign. I suppose he might have come up with it independently, not being aware of its previous use, though. He probably gets credit for popularizing it. Return to normalcy - Wikipedia

17

I thought so, but checking up on Wikipedia it seems like it was actually his brother Josef who suggested it!
Certainly, it is derived from the Czech word for “work”, and may well have been used before. Nevertheless, the modern meaning (mechanic worker) must be credited to the Capeks.

18

Nucelar - George W. Bush

19

William Gibson --> Cyberspace

Zoe Deschanel --> Adorkable

George Eastman --> Kodak

Page & Brin --> Google

Ryan Lochte --> Jeah!

20

Italics and brackets added.

I forgot that “quark” starts off with–and the reason for the “q”–is “quack” as we’ll as “squawk.” The “ua” is thus both standard English orthography as well as a nod to the merger of the “u” in “mustering” the “a” in “Mark.”

Thus, finally
Quark [etym]: Quack + squawk + muster + master + Mark

There.