Language has always been a living, breathing entity, and literature has long been one of the major driving forces in its evolution. Throughout literary history, authors have not only kept certain words alive and popularized others, but they have also invented entirely new words to suit specific circumstances. In some cases, they may have been trying to capture a precise meaning, emotion, or concept but found the weighty collection of words in the dictionary lacking — and so they improvised by creating something new. Other terms were invented through the sheer joy of wordplay and whimsy, playing with sounds and syllables to make a word that sings. And some were born of technological necessity, to describe something new — or something yet to exist.
Here are 10 words invented by famous writers, from Milton’s “pandemonium” to William Gibson’s “cyberspace.”
In John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, Pandemonium is the name of the capital of hell — where the devil and his demons live. It was a carefully constructed word, with Milton combining the Greek pan, meaning “all” or “together,” with daimonion, relating to demons. It literally meant “place of all demons,” which sounds like a pretty chaotic place to be — hence the word’s evolution to describe any scene of wild chaos or uproar.
Lewis Carroll invented “chortle” when writing his poem “Jabberwocky” — arguably the most famous nonsense poem of all time — which appeared in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass. By blending “chuckle” and “snort,” he created a word that perfectly describes a particular type of gleeful laughter.
The word “freelance” comes from Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe, in which a feudal lord refers to the paid army he has assembled as his “Free Lances.” There is no written record of this usage before Ivanhoe, suggesting that its origins lie with Scott and his mercenary knights.
Before Charles Dickens created the character of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, the world was lacking a wonderfully evocative word. Dickens may have chosen Ebenezer’s surname because it sounds like “scrouge,” meaning “to squeeze or press against,” as well as “screw,” an old-fashioned English word for a miser. “Scrooge,” of course, is now a universal shorthand for an extremely tight-fisted or miserly person.
Jonathan Swift created the word “Yahoo” (proper noun) in Gulliver’s Travels, as the name of an imaginary race of brutish, humanlike creatures. The word then entered English as a common noun for crude, uncouth people. As for the search engine, Yahoo!, that is a backronym for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle” — and the founders apparently liked the association with Swift’s Yahoos, too.
Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the word “robot” in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The word came from the Czech robota, meaning “forced labor” or “drudgery.” It was Čapek’s brother Josef who suggested the term when Karel was searching for a word to describe artificial beings created only to work for humans.
Utopia was an imaginary island in Sir Thomas More’s 1516 fictional work of the same name. The island is presented by the narrator as having a perfect social, legal, and political system. The word “utopia” soon entered wider usage to describe an ideal society — although scholars still debate whether More’s ambiguous work was serious or satirical in nature.
Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity” in a 1754 letter he wrote to Horace Mann. He explained how he came up with the word, which was inspired by a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes in the story were always making fortunate discoveries by accident while searching for something else. Walpole combined “Serendip” (an old name for Sri Lanka/Ceylon) with the suffix “-ity” to create the word we now use for making a happy and unexpected discovery by chance.
The word “paparazzi” — referring to intrusive photographers who pursue celebrities to take photographs of them — has its origins in the classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita. Written and directed by Federico Fellini, the movie features a character named Paparazzo, a photographer who is fearless and relentless in his hunt for a lucrative shot. While “paparazzi” wasn’t invented directly by Fellini (it’s as if the name was in the plural form in Italian), it does have its origins in his script for La Dolce Vita.
William Gibson is widely credited with inventing the word “cyberspace,” which first appeared in literature in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” (and was later popularized in his 1984 novel Neuromancer). In a 2020 interview, he told Time magazine, “I remember early in my career looking at a yellow legal on which I wrote down infospace and dataspace, and they just looked woefully unsexy. Then I wrote cyberspace and it just rolled off the tongue.” He also noted how a Scandinavian artist had previously used the word in relation to an abstract painting — but Gibson rightfully takes the credit in the literary world.
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