In total, the Oxford English Dictionary contains some 3,000,000 quotations taken from many thousands of different sources and the works of hundreds of different authors. Shakespeare, the single most-quoted literary figure, is followed by Sir Walter Scott, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, John Dryden and Charles Dickens, but of all of these it is Chaucer who provides the earliest written evidence for the most words with his works offering the first attestations of some 2,000 English terms, from abated to ygrounded (a Middle English equivalent of grounded). Listed here are ten more words whose creation can similarly be credited to an individual author, with entries here ranging from Jonathan Swift in the early eighteenth century (YAHOO) through to Stephen King (PIE-HOLE) and William Gibson (CYBERSPACE) in the 1980s.
A combination of ‘chuckle’ and ‘snort’, the word chortle was coined by the English writer Lewis Carroll (the pen-name for Charles Dodgson) for his classic 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll is widely celebrated for his linguistic inventiveness as a writer and coined a vast number of similar words, which he termed ‘portmanteaux’, by combining two or more existing terms. Amongst them are frumious, from ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’; mimsy, implying both ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’; frabjous, from ‘fabulous’ and ‘joyous’; slithy, presumably based on ‘slimy’ and ‘lithe’; and galumphing, ‘triumphantly galloping’, used in his poem ‘Jabberwocky’.
A name for the theoretical ‘space’ in which communication via the internet or similar electronic means is supposed to take place, the term cyberspace is credited to the American-born science-fiction writer William Gibson who coined the word for use in his short story ‘Burning Chrome’ in 1982. The prefix cyber-, as found here and in many other modern words making reference to the internet like cybersquatting, cybercriminal, cybergeek and cybercafé, is derived from cybernetics, the science of communication, which in turn takes its name from the Greek for a skilful pilot or steersman, kubernetikos.
Used to describe a dreamt or imagined scene or, more literally, the landscape of a dreamt place, the word dreamscape is first attested in a 1958 poem, ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’, by the American writer Sylvia Plath. One of twentieth-century America’s most important female writers, Plath was known for her inventive use of language, creating such unusual terms as sleep-talk (for her poem ‘Maudlin’ in 1956), wind-ripped (‘Suicide Off Egg Rock’, 1959), sweat-wet (‘Zoo Keeper’s Wife’, 1961), and grrr, which she used as a verb in her short story for children, The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit (1959), describing alleycats ‘grrring with admiration’.
The earliest recorded use of the word freelance in English comes from Sir Walter Scott’s classic novel Ivanhoe, written in 1819. Although today used in reference to a journalist or similar person employed on a project-by-project rather than full-time basis, the term originally described a mercenary knight or soldier with no particular allegiance to any specific country or cause, and who instead offered his services in exchange for money. The word was first recorded in reference to someone who works on a freelance basis in 1899.
Familiar as both the name of a type of loose-fitting breeches (knickerbockers) and as the name of a dessert of ice cream and other confectionaries (knickerbocker glory), on its first appearance in English the word knickerbocker was in fact used to refer to someone descended from the original Dutch settlers of New York. In this sense, the word is derived from a pseudonym of the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century American writer Washington Irving, author of the folktales ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’, who published his first major work, a popular, satirical History of New York, under the alias Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809.
The word nerd is usually credited to the American children’s author Dr Seuss, who used it as the name of a peculiar animal in his 1950 book If I Ran The Zoo. The poem was accompanied by a picture of a short, squat, grumpy-looking creature with a long face and straggly white hair that appears more cantankerous than nerdy, leading to some debate whether the subsequent use of nerd in reference to a bookish or awkward person (first recorded the following year, in the United States’ Newsweek magazine) is indeed taken from Dr Seuss. If not, nerd could alternatively be derived from nerts or nertz, a 1920s slang term for ‘nonsense’ or ‘madness’; Mortimer Snerd, a dummy used by the popular American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in the 1940s and 1950s; or even knurd, a humorous reversal of the letters of the word ‘drunk’, implying that nerds on American college campuses tended to avoid drinking and partying.
The earliest recorded meaning of the word pie-hole in English is as another word for an eyelet, a hole on a garment through which a lace or cord can be threaded, which derives from an old sixteenth-century Scots dialect word, py. As a slang term for the mouth, however, pie-hole was first recorded in the American horror writer Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine. Whether King himself coined the word in this sense is unknown, but either way it is likely that it is modelled on the earlier term cake-hole, which dates from the 1940s.
The word robot was first used in the 1920 play R.U.R. (‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’) written by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, which was first translated into English in 1923. Although the invention of the word is generally credited to Čapek himself, he in turn claimed it was the suggestion of his brother, Josef, who presumably based it on one of a number of existing Czech words including robotnik, meaning ‘slave’, and robota, meaning ‘drudgery’ or ‘servitude’. Unlike the modern use of the word, Čapek’s robots were not automated machines but rather artificial ‘people’, biological entities of skin and bone that are mass-produced in factories. Originally built to work for humans, the robots eventually coordinate a rebellion and take over the world, leading to the extinction of the human race.
Derived from the Latin tintinnabulum (used since the sixteenth century as the name of a type of handbell or series of bells used as a musical instrument), the noun tintinnabulation, ‘ringing of bells’, dates from the nineteenth century in English and is believed to have been coined by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe for his 1831 poem ‘The Bells’ – ‘From the time, time, time . . . / To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells.’ The word is one of several for which Poe’s works provide the first recorded use, with others including sentience (first found in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 1839), multicolour (in the short tale ‘The Landscape Garden’, 1842) and normality (used in his essay Eureka, 1848).
Coined by Jonathan Swift as the name of a race of brutish men who appear in his 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, within just a few years of the novel’s publication the word yahoo began to be used more widely in English as a synonym for any similarly loutish, violent or unsophisticated person, and eventually a hooligan or thug. The word is one of a number of Swift’s creations that have found their way into the language, as even some of the most bizarre names used in Gulliver’s Travels have gained broader, figurative meanings in modern English. The opposite adjectives Brobdingnagian (‘oversized’, ‘enormous’) and Lilliputian (‘tiny’), for instance, come from the names of the two contrasting lands of Brobdingnag and Lilliput in the novel; splacknuck, the name of a wild creature of Brobdingnag, can be used in English as another name for an unusual-looking person or animal; and both big-endian and little-endian are used allusively in English to refer to the two rivalling parties in some petty dispute, derived from the great argument amongst the Lilliputians as to which end of a soft-boiled egg should rightly be cracked open.