How would I go about starting a new word into circulation? How many new words are created each year?
First of all, you’d have to kimfher its hudarios into a text fimwer, then type it aheras, then send it by kawwnho to Merriam-Webster.
Do you have one in mind? If so, start using it. Figure out how to get it used in media (such as, say, the SDMB).
Ringo has the gist of it. But you have to come up with a word that fills a need. Lots of people coin words all the time. Relatively few are used by anyone but the originator and even fewer make it into dictionaries.
Some people coin words and then send them directly to dictionaries. Some even want to the dictionaries to buy their words. Yeah, like lexicographers don’t already have enough words. They actually have far more than they can fit in the limited space of the dictionaries and one of their difficult tasks is to pare their word list down.
As an example of a word coiner, look up Gelett Burgess. He was a humorist in the first half of the 20th century who also liked to coin words. He even got a small book of his coinages published (Burgess Unabridged). Well, the words in that were mostly meant to be humorous, and some actually are. No where near as good as Douglas Adams’s The Meaning of Liff though.
Anyway, Burgess actually got one of his coinages adopted into regular use. Or maybe one and a half. The one true coinage he made was blurb, which filled a definite need. The other was an additional meaning to bromide. That is, the meaning of a trite, hackneyed saying.
Burgess’s record is actually pretty good compared with many other word coiners.
I read somewhere that someone made a bet that he could get a new word into use I think within a few weeks or months. He wrote the word on bathroom stalls and he won the bet. The problem is that I can’t remember the word. Maybe it was the word quiz…
Yeah, it was quiz, but it was street urchins hired to write on the walls of Dublin. This is one of those colorful etymology stories that aren’t true. They’re repeated either because they are much more fun than the real etymology or (as in this case) we don’t have a good etymology.
Here’s the full story on quiz from Dave Wilton’s WordOrigins page.
This was also discussed in a recent thread, my ecquaintances.
A usage I don’t believe I’ve come across in practice.
There are plenty of semi-techinical words whose origin is well documented, but which have passed into the common vocabulary: scientist and dinosaur are two that spring to mind. To generalise from these, it would appear to help to be some sort of public authority in the area in question. But that’s hardly a surprise.