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Coinage

المؤلف:  Rochelle Lieber

المصدر:  Introducing Morphology

الجزء والصفحة:  51-3

15-1-2022

1550

Coinage

It is of course possible to make up entirely new words from whole cloth, a process called coinage. However, we rarely coin completely new words, choosing instead to recycle bases and affixes into new combinations. New products are sometimes given coined names like Kodak, Xerox, or Kleenex, and these in turn sometimes come to be used as common nouns: kodak was at one time used for cameras in general, and xerox and kleenex are still used respectively for copiers and facial tissue by some American English speakers. But it’s relatively rare to coin new words. I was able to find only the following four apparent coinages:

Why are there so few coinages? Perhaps because the words themselves give no clue to their meaning. Context often clarifies what a word is intended to mean, but without a context to suggest meaning, the words themselves are semantically opaque. It is no wonder that many of the pure coinages that creep into English come from original product names: the association of the coined word with the product makes its meaning clear, and occasionally the word will then be generalized to any instance of that product, even if manufactured by a different company.