That doesn’t sound like the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel.
My favorite usage of it:
And Xena is a bit of a complicated case. Officially, the International Astronomical Union is the only body which can name celestial objects. Traditionally, the discoverer of the object gets to choose the name, but it has to be officially approved by the IAU. Well, the same team that discovered Xena had previously discovered Sedna, and announced the name they had chosen in a press conference. They caught some flak from the IAU for that, announcing the name before it’d been officially approved. Well, now they have a suggestion for the official name for this new iceball, but they’re following the rules this time and not saying what it is until it’s officially confirmed. But in the meantime, nobody wants to call the thing by a catalog number all the time, so they’re using “Xena” as a placeholder to unofficially call it until the official name is approved. All I can say is, the IAU had better get off their collective duffs and approve the official name soon, or nobody’s ever going to call it anything but Xena anyway.
No, it was not.
Observe–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton_(Planet)
The gas was named in 1898, the fictional planet in 1939.
Paula doesn’t rhyme with trawler? How on earth do you pronounce it?
Well, we’re Americans, so we pronounce the final “r” in trawler, for a start.
Lewis Carroll also gave us “Wonderland” and L. Frank Baum contributed “Oz.”
I have a hunch “Spamalot” will be joining this list in the near future.
Not all of you, of course. In Maine y’all have non-rhotic accents and trawlers, which combine to create Trollahs.
E.C. Segar introduced the word “jeep” in his comic strip Thimble Theater starring Popeye . Eugene the Jeep was a magical fourth-dimensional creature that could go anywhere and do almost anything. It’s not clear whether Segar’s jeep influenced the name of the four-wheel-drive vehicle. Some dictionaries say the original military vehicle was called a “General Purpose” or “GP” vehicle, thus “jeep.” It could be, though, that soldiers were aware of the comic strip character when they applied the name to the car - sometimes things happen for more than one reason.
Segar didn’t invent the word “goon,” but he certainly helped popularize it with the character Alice the Goon - a monster that the Sea Hag enslaved to try to destroy Popeye. Segar’s “goon” was similar to the current meaning of the word: a thug hired to intimidate or hurt one’s opponents.
Two words ( both fictitious places) come to mind. Utopia (Thomas More) and Shangri la (James Hilton, Lost Horizon)
Swifts Brobdignagian and Lilliputian have sort of entered the language as words meaning oversized or undersized.
Low-brow connoisseur checking in, with
JK Rowling’s muggle, now in the OED, and
Charles Schulz’ security blanket.
Quite aside from being an expensive brand of appliances, ‘smeg’ was introduced to common parlance by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor in their SF comedy series Red Dwarf. Clearly a contraction of smegma, but as an expletive, smeg was a novel creation.
That’s true, but in the book, Tom was portrayed as being noble, not subservient.
If we count myths as literature, then we have words like “titan,” “odyssey,” and “siren” (meaning an attractive woman), and phrases like “Achilles heel.”
Al Capp coined “Sadie Hawkins Day,” which was used for a time as “Sadie Hawkins Day Dance,” where the girls would ask the boys out. I suspect that term has faded, though.
The word “vamp,” meaning “a predatory woman” is a short form of the title of Rudyard Kipling poem “The Vampire.”
See post #70 
Sir Philip Sidney coined the name Pamela for his poem Arcadia.
The word blurb comes from Miss Belinda Blurb, a woman created by humorist Gelett Burgess to provide a gushingly complimentary “review” on the jacket of one of his books.
Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt inspired Babbittry, a word which refers to the narrow-minded self-satisfaction embodied by the book’s title character.
Most of my favorites have been mentioned, but I have to add two notes here:
The practice of naming the monster “Frankenstein” isn’t a mistake made by audiences of the 1931 movie. The monster himself is called “Frankenstein” in Peggy Webling’s play (the one the film credits as its source, but doesn’t really resemble closely). There’s a copy of the program in the book of the Universal screeplay, and you can see Hamilton Deane, who played the Monster, credited as “Frankenstein”. I suspect the prace predates the Webling play, but don’t have any earlier evidence.
The practice of calling mechanical arms/hands “waldoes” is respected in science fiction, where Arthur C. Clarke and others have used the term, but I’m not sure how far outside the field it’s known. I remember reading something by someone in the field of such mechanical devices taking umbrage at the thought that this term was widespread in his industry, where he’d never jeard it used. And I have to admit I’ve never seen it used outside of science fiction.
Likewise, we generally don’t put terminal R’s on words that end in vowels.
Rabelais even provides an etymology. When Gargantua is born, his father says “Que grand tu as,” (“how big you are”), and the people in attendance suggest that the boy be named according to the first words of the father, after the fashion of the ancient Hebrews.
As to the OP, I was going to nominate a number of Dickens characters whose names have spawned common words – micawberish, jarndycean, etc. – but then I realized that the OP was asking for actual coinages. Let’s see…
Okay, how about “astronaut”? From Wikipedia: “The first known use of the term ‘astronaut’ was by Neil R. Jones in his short story The Death’s Head Meteor in 1930.”
And I feel sure there must be something in Dr. Seuss, but nothing comes to mind.
Rabelais even provides an etymology. When Gargantua is born, his father says “Que grand tu as,” (“how big you are”), and the people in attendance suggest that the boy be named according to the first words of the father, after the fashion of the ancient Hebrews.
As to the OP, I was going to nominate a number of Dickens characters whose names have spawned common words – micawberish, jarndycean, etc. – but then I realized that the OP was asking for actual coinages. Let’s see…
Okay, how about “astronaut”? From Wikipedia: “The first known use of the term ‘astronaut’ was by Neil R. Jones in his short story The Death’s Head Meteor in 1930.”
And I feel sure there must be something in Dr. Seuss, but nothing comes to mind.
Oops, sorry about that. The trouble you get into when your short-term memory goes!