He did the same with elves and trolls, and I understand his plural for dwarves is different from the previously-usual one.
John Wheeler coined both “black hole” and “wormhole” in their astronomical contexts.
If this is considered a hijack, please just ignore.
Listing words coined by famous people, reminds me that some people became famous because their names became words. So, for example, we have:
boycott - named with respect to one Charles Boycott
sandwich - after the Earl of Sandwich
guillotine - after Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
And, a more obscure one:
shrapnel - named for General Henry Shrapnel
I’m certain there are more, plenty more. Wanna play?
Heinlein coined the word “Waldo” meaning auxiliary hands for working on radioactive material or other stuff inconvenient to touch.
Sideburns, after Ambrose Burnside
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:26, topic:658389”]
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Political jabs are not allowed in GQ. Don’t do this again.
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I’m going to credit Bush with ‘misunderestimate’, a perfectly cromulent word that I have employed on several occasions.
As for famous people, Thomas Jefferson has been mentioned as a neologist.
But he was also a creative speller and would sometimes use different spellings of a word in the same document.
Side thought- obviously made up words, but invented by whom?
Television for example- did Philo T Farnsworth invent the word, as well as the device?
This piqued my morbid interest, so I checked out this book. White performs due diligence researching the various sources for the sake of accurate body counts. But I was disappointed by what he left out: no mention at all of the Boers who died of neglect in British concentration camps; a brief note on the Hereros who were driven by the Germans to die in the Namibia but none at all of the camp on Shark Island; and he discounts the Potato Famine as an atrocity, ignoring the fact that fungus can’t read maps and all the potatoes in Northern Europe were blighted but only Ireland starved. Mr. White subscribes to the theory that governments can only commit sins of commission, not omission.
Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme”.
What I would dearly love to know is who was responsible for the first documented use of “irregardless” ?
I could make a shrewd guess, but apparently political jabs are not allowed…
Chauvinist! (although Nicolas Chauvin may not have been a real person).
Does that mean Will Ferrell (or his writer, rather) gets credit for strategery?
The thing about “nuke you lar” is it’s not even a different word, just a perfectly cromulant regional/folksy pronunciation of an existing word, thus out of scope of this thread altogether even if it wasn’t just a political jab.
Who was the famous person that coined that word? I know that the word came from Mesmer’s name, but that’s not what this thread is about. If we were just talking about words that came from people’s names we’d be listing quisling, volt, amp, Curium, Einsteinium, ohm, Kelvin, Fahrenheit, Celsius, Coulomb, Farad, Henry, decibel, Pascal, Joule, Watt, Lawrencium, Bohrium, Fermium, Mendelevium, and a zillion different species names.
(Sure, KarlGauss, I’ll play – and include gauss as one of the words 
– but we should do that in a different thread so we’re not hijacking this one)
I’d say the scientist examples don’t count; they’re not coining words, they’re naming things.
That was so funny I almost choked on my pretzel.
Well, yes, but they’re naming things with new words. But that doesn’t always happen for scientific things. For instance, the list of words by Ben Franklin that someone posted above were not new – they were existing words that Franklin added new meanings to.
Just came across one yesterday doing the 5/26/13 Sunday Washington Post Crossword.
(Spoiler boxed in case you are planning on doing that puzzle.)
Tintinnabulation: Coined by Edgar Allan Poe for the sound of a ringing bell. Got to admit, though, that it is hardly common.
Does this count (for the purposes of this discussion, I mean)?
From Wikipedia:
Dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson is credited by some for coining “copacetic”, but it looks like the jury is still out on that one. I could’ve sworn I read decades ago that the word was coined by the early-20th-century boxer Jack Johnson but no amount of googling could turn up any cites.
I’d say the jury is back and the verdict is Robinson was spinning a yarn.
It would be an extraordinary shoeshine boy indeed that managed to get his neologism in print and used by a respected biographer of Lincoln the very same year that he’d come up with it.