Lexical innovation: cromulently embiggening a language

What is it about?

This article looks at the main ways of making new English words, and at the different types of neologisms this produces; considers various categories of people who coin them, including famous authors and television scriptwriters as well as anonymous nonnative speakers of English as a lingua franca, and highlights the similarities and differences in the ways they tend to coin words; considers to what extent the formation of new words by way of established processes or rules or schemas should be thought of as morphological productivity rather than individual creativity; and finally looks at the processes by which neologisms can, potentially, be diffused.

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