As common as fanciful names are in the land of fiction, Skywalker, Targaryen, and McFly aren’t too prevalent in the real world. Instead, you’re more likely to encounter someone named Smith, Wang, or any of the other eminently popular surnames that are shared by millions of people around the globe.

The practice of classifying families by surname started in China in 2852 BCE, for organizational reasons. Today, surnames tend to fall into five categories: patronymics (names referring to fathers or ancestors), personal characteristics, occupations, toponymics (home region), and clans and tribes. Census data shows that surnames generally vary by region: Occupational surnames are more of a European or Western tradition, patronymics dominate much of Asia and Latin America, and names related to personal characteristics are common in much of Africa. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule; enslaved people often had to take the surnames of their subjugators, which is why many Black families in the U.S. have European surnames.

In English-speaking countries, the most popular surname is Smith, with around 2.5 million people named Smith in America alone. This name developed to designate an occupation, such as a blacksmith or silversmith. 

In China, more than 92 million people go by the surname Wang, making it the most common last name in the world. The name is believed to have exploded in popularity around 250 BCE, when many royal families changed their name to Wang — meaning “king” in Mandarin — after the Zhou dynasty fell to the first Qin dynasty emperor. Li, Zhang, and Chen are other Chinese surnames shared by tens of millions of people.

In India, Devi, from the Sanskrit word for the Hindu mother goddess, is particularly common. Even when it’s not an official surname, Devi is sometimes used after the first name of a Hindu woman as a sign of respect. In Vietnam, about 40% of the population shares the last name Nguyen, and in South Korea, around 20% of the population goes by the surname Kim.

Many of these names are hundreds or thousands of years old, but new names are being created all the time. It’s become more of a common practice in Western countries to hyphenate or combine surnames when people get married, which has created brand-new names that bridge cultures and name origins. 

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Learning the alphabet is as easy as ABC … or AБB, ABΓ, and ႠႡႢ, depending on your language (those examples being from Cyrillic, Greek, and Georgian). English, Spanish, French, and many other languages use the 26-letter Latin alphabet that you likely learned in preschool, along with a handy song. But there are eight standard alphabet groups worldwide: Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Brahmi, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, and Latin.

Most Western languages (English, the Romance languages, Germanic languages) use the Latin alphabet, with one notable exception. The Greek language is considered a Western language, but it’s an outlier in that it has its own alphabet. This ancient alphabet, developed around 1000 BCE, is the ancestor of all modern European languages. The word “alphabet” itself comes from the first and second letters of the Greek lettering system: “alpha” and “beta.” There are 24 letters in the Greek system, and while many of them look similar to Latin letters (Alpha is “A,” Epsilon is “E,” Kappa is “K,” Chi is “X,” for example), they have different names. We see evidence of the Greek alphabet adorning fraternities and sororities all over the United States, but we often use the Latin alphabet to write the words (Phi Beta Sigma is ΦΒΣ in the Greek, for example). 

Arabic is an alphabet composed of 18 shapes and 28 phonetic sounds. This alphabet is used by Arabic speakers and those who speak Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu, and other Middle Eastern languages and dialects. Aramaic is an ancient language spoken on a smaller scale in the Middle East, and the alphabet consists of 22 letters that indicate consonants (but some can stand in for vowels). It’s used mainly in a liturgical sense by religious communities in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Aramaic has close ties to Brahmi, an ancient script used throughout Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The Brahmi script is used by many language families, including Mongolic, Tai, and Dravidian. Sanskrit and Hindi developed out of the Brahmi script.

The Armenian alphabet and the Georgian alphabet are widely used throughout the Caucasus region. The Armenian script, with 31 consonants and seven vowels, developed in the fifth century. The unique Georgian alphabet, meanwhile, is used only to write the Georgian language. This alphabet, comprised of 33 letters without any distinction between upper or lower case, has three variations still in use: mrgvlovani, nuskhuri, and mkhedruli. The Cyrillic script, consisting of 20 consonants, 10 vowels, a semivowel, and two modifier letters, was developed in the ninth or 10th century. It forms the basis for more than 50 languages, including Russian, Kazakh, and Serbian. 

Some languages — Mandarin and Japanese, for example — don’t use a traditional alphabet, but use logosyllabic icons to represent different sounds. Written characters in Chinese languages are called hanzi, whereas Japanese has three different sets of phonetic symbols: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Appreciating that world language systems are vast, with incredibly rich histories, goes a long way toward understanding the melting pot that is the English language.

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The late great comedian Norm Macdonald commented: “ID… there’s a strange abbreviation when you think about it. ‘I’ is short for ‘I,’ and then ‘D’ is short for dentification.'”

Macdonald wasn’t quite right with his assessment, but he was correct in that some abbreviations can be more confusing than they are helpful. If you can’t decipher what an abbreviation stands for, should the word or phrase be shortened at all? Even everyday terms may boggle the mind: For example, why is “pound” abbreviated as “lb”? Maybe you memorized the term in school, or maybe one day you asked the deli manager what that “LB” on the sticker meant, but it’s not an easy one to decipher on its own, because the word and its abbreviation don’t share a single letter. There is an answer as to why it’s shortened that way, though, and it dates back to ancient Rome.

The Romans used a basic unit of weight called a libra (~0.722 pounds), derived from the Latin for “scale” or “balance.” Libra pondo is a Latin phrase that translates to “a pound by weight.” When these terms reached Britain, they became the standard for weighing gold and silver. The abbreviation “lb” is a shortening of libra that was carried over to the English word “pound.” The British currency is also called the pound, and the £ symbol represents libra.

Another concept worth mentioning is the Roman uncia, a Latin word that translates to “one-twelfth.” It was used by the Romans as a unit of measurement for one-twelfth of a libra, and it became the inspiration for the English word “ounce.” So, where did that “z” in the abbreviation “oz” come from? On the journey from Latin to English, there was a detour with the Italian word onza.

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In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons entitled “Lisa the Iconoclast,” teachers Edna Krabappel and Elizabeth Hoover show their students a film about Springfield’s founder, Jebediah Springfield. When asked how he achieved such greatness, Jebediah says, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” Krabappel then remarks, “‘Embiggens’? Hmm, I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield,” to which Hoover replies, “I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

Embiggens? Cromulent? Where did these words come from?

All for Nonce

While the Merriam-Webster entry for “embiggen” gives no mention of the animated series, it does mark the first usage as 1996, which is when The Simpsons showrunners asked the show’s writers to come up with two “nonce words,” or “word[s] or expression[s] coined for or used on one occasion.”

The verb “embiggen,” which means “to make bigger or more expansive,” was cleverly paired with “cromulent,” an adjective that means “acceptable” or “fine.” The Simpsons fans are well accustomed to layers of smart humor in the seemingly mindless animated comedy, but even this joke might have slipped by those without linguistic knowledge. But “the perfectly cromulent” lines launched the journey for these made-up words to become a part of the popular lexicon. “Embiggen” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2018, and “cromulent” was added to the corpus in 2023, after being listed as a “word we’re watching” for several years.

Published appearances of “cromulent” include a 2013 Supreme Court amicus brief over a matter of copyright infringement, and a New York Times article in 2020, when Deb Amlen wrote: “I suspect that one of the scariest moments for new [crossword] solvers is when they discover that it is perfectly cromulent for constructors to clue answers in a way that means one thing, but twists the answers into real words that mean something totally different.”

You, Too, Can Embiggen the English Language

It’s not as though the New York Times crossword desk has a monopoly on playing with language in cromulent ways. People make up new words all the time — in etymology, this is called a “neologism,” or a word or phrase coined to adapt to meet changes occurring in the life and culture of its speakers. The nonce (one-use) words of “embiggen” and “cromulent” turned into neologisms as more people and publications continued to use them.

Such linguistic behavior has been going on for centuries; this isn’t even the first time The Simpsons has made it into the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary added Homer’s catchphrase “D’oh!” to the dictionary in 2001. Alice in Wonderland writer Lewis Carroll also was a notorious neologist — we can thank him for embiggening the English language with “chortle,” “bandersnatch,” and “snark,” to name a few.

So take this as a challenge to create your own neologism — “There Should Be a Word for That! (So Make One Up.)” offers a helpful primer, including the concepts of compounding (“duckface,” “manspreading”) and blending (“brunch,” “listicle”). We’ll eagerly await your creations to become the next “cromulent” and “embiggen.”

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