Where do new words come from?
Word Factory
Where do new words come from?
Right now, you're reading words that didn't exist a thousand years ago. "Internet." "Selfie." "Astronaut." Where did they come from? Did someone just wake up one morning and decide to invent them?
Actually, yes. New words are invented all the time, and humans have been doing it for as long as we've had language. When something new enters the world — a gadget, an idea, a feeling we've never named — we need a word for it. So we make one up.
