Almost - malaprop comes from the character Madam Malaprop, but it’s from Sheridan’s play “The Rivals.”
Some medical examples:
Freud: psychoanalysis
Ehrlich: chemotherapy
Virchow: leukemia
Fleming: penicillin
Jenner: vaccine
Jung: synchronicity
“Lilliputian,” from Swift. Also from Gulliver’s Travels, “yahoo” for a crude, brutish person.
Actually, in the context of the story, Capek’s robots were artificial humans - flesh and bone. The use of the term for truly mechanical workers seems to have taken hold spontaneously.
No. It was Lyndon Johnson who was also mocked for that.
Trickeration - Don King
So “famous” is to be understood relative to your ignorance. Noted.
Whewell was manifestly famous and influential enough in his time to have got several new words into the language, where they are now in wide general use. Nobodies don’t do that.
But the verb to visualize (like its derivatives, such as visualization)* is not the mere verbing of an adjective by adding a suffix. It does not mean “to make visual” as the standard suffixing rule might lead you to expect, but “to visually imagine”. (At least, that is what it meant when Coleridge coined it, and what has continued to most commonly mean for almost two centuries since. Only quite recently, I think, has it also begun to be used to mean “make [some sort of information] visual”, or “present information that is not inherently visual in visual form”.)
So yes, I think to visualize counts as a true coinage by Coleridge, by contrast with the more recent emergent meaning, which may indeed perhaps be written off as the mere result of applying a suffix in the standard way.
*Actually, I do not exactly recall whether Coleridge initially coined the verb form, or the nouning of that verb: visualization. Either way, though, it was a new a meaning, and the one derives directly from the other in a way that neither directly derives from visual.
One way of coining a new word is as a portmanteau. Although the word existed to describe a kind of luggage, Lewis Carroll was the first to use it with this meaning.
Gosh, ninjaed by a Topologist.
Lewis Carroll deliberately made up words in Jabberwocky (among other poems).
Few of which have made it into the standard lexicon, but portmanteau is a beautiful repurposing of an old and probably obscure word.
I wish mimsy had made it, personally.
Neal Stephenson re-coined avatar (as in, an individual’s visual representation & identity in a virtual environment), does that count ? The word already existed in Hinduism of course, but he gave it an entirely new meaning.
Tolkien’s orcs
Feanor’s Morgoth
Actually I believe that originally an Orc was some kind of obscure mythological sea creature, but Tolkien transformed it into the modern meaning.
Does “Catch-22” count?
Matt Groening gave us “sacrelicious”.
What? It is a perfectly cromulent word.
Well, as far as my posts go. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to do otherwise. There’s not a good, objective way to measure famousness.
OK, you convinced me.
Checking the dates of first usage from Merriam-Webster, visualize has a date of 1817 and visualization, 1883. The former is during Coleridge’s life, while the latter is long after he died.
After further research, I found that Jefferson didn’t propose the use of the word dime for the US coin. It turns out that was done in a report by two other guys: Samuel Osgood and Walter Livingston. (Jefferson called his proposed one-tenth dollar coin either a BIT or a TENTH.) The Osgood-Livingston report was made in 1786 (which is the date M-W gives for the word) with the official legislation being in 1792.
BTW, the official name of the coin is dime, not 10-cent piece. That is, the US coin has that official name (look at its reverse, it says ONE DIME); the Canadian coin is officially a 10-cent piece, although everyone calls it a dime anyway.
But Jefferson is credited with a number of other coinages. I couldn’t find a complete list.online, however various webpages claim he originated belittle, lengthily, Anglophobia, electioneering, indecipherable and monotonously. Not all of those are high quality coinages, though.
My impression is that the concensus among experts is that the Dr Seuss usage is probably coincidence. M-W says gives the Seuss book but qualifies it with a “perhaps”.
As far as genocides, lets not debate here what the first one was. Start another thread to do that. It looks like Raphael Lemkin did indeed coin the word, and that’s all that counts here.
We’ll wait for sacrelicious to become an established English word. However, cromulent does seem to be establishing itself, at least among SDMBers. Credit for that word goes to David X. Cohen, a writer on both The Simpsons and Futurama.
Thanks to everyone for their contributions.
I know, that’s why I hedged by saying “first printed use” instead of “Dr. Seuss invented.” Gimme a break, I came up with four solid ones. 
To briefly continue this hijack, a good book for hashing out relative dates and body counts from genocides / mass killings is The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, by statistician Matthew White.
And to go back on topic, Mr. White (although arguably not very famous) has coined a few terms for his area of interest. He calls himself an atrocitologist, and takes as his topic multicides. Recognizing that WWII and WWI were inextricably linked, and that many multicides can be loosely associated with those two events (Mao and Stalin, for example), he calls that whole great 20th-century extended bloodletting “the hemoclysm.”
Ben Franklin coined battery, attested by the whole internet, and if this page is to be believed, these other electrical words too:
[ul]
[li]charge[/li][li] condensor[/li][li] conductor[/li][li] plus[/li][li] minus[/li][li] positively[/li][li] negatively[/li][li] armature[/li][/ul]
I would accept it. Well-known and used often enough to be misused.
Isn’t this a case of wording a coin?
According to Wikipedia, “Nucular” actually has a rather auspicious pedigree:
“U.S. presidents who have used this pronunciation include Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Other users include Homer Simpson, and Professor Marcus du Sautoy.
Edward Teller, “father” of the American hydrogen bomb, used this particular pronunciation, and this usage is a limited tradition within the American nuclear research establishment.”