It is probably Charles Dickens who above all other writers has contributed the most characters to the language, with more than twenty of his creations – including such recognizable figures as Scrooge (‘miser’), Micawber (‘optimist’) and Fagin (‘thief’) – now listed as entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. The cold-hearted headmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times has given his surname to anyone similarly cold or unyielding; a Stiggins is defined as a ‘pious humbug’, taken from the surname of the Reverend Stiggins in The Pickwick Papers; and a Gummidge is a pessimistic grumbler, named after the dour widow in David Copperfield. Some of Dickens’s characters have even produced their own derivatives in English, including Tapleyism, meaning ‘unfaltering optimism’, derived from Mark Tapley in Martin Chuzzlewit; bumbledom, meaning ‘pomposity’ or ‘officiousness’, named after the self-important beadle Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist; and WELLERISM, listed here.
A combination of brain and maniac, the word brainiac derives from the name of a devious, super-intelligent adversary of Superman who first appeared in The Super-Duel in Space, one of DC Comics’s ‘Action Comics’ series printed in 1958. One of Superman’s most memorable enemies, the name brainiac eventually slipped into more general use in English in the 1970s, and was first recorded as nickname for an extremely intelligent or geekish person in 1975.
The name of both a pale grey-green colour and a type of green porcelain originally produced in China, the word celadon is thought to derive from Céladon, the name of a character who habitually dressed in pale green ribbons in L’Astrée (1627), a work by the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century French writer Honoré d’Urfé. In turn, d’Urfé is believed to have adopted the name from a character mentioned in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, namely a guest at the wedding of Andromeda of whom no mention is made other than to say that he is killed by Perseus.
First recorded in English in 1590, Harlequin was one of the stock characters of English pantomime who was adopted from French comic theatre and the popular commedia dell’arte of Italy in the sixteenth century. In English theatrical tradition, Harlequin is usually depicted as a clown or mime, armed with a wooden sword or wand, and dressed in a ludicrously garish costume – indeed, the word harlequin has been used as an adjective meaning ‘variegated’ or ‘multi-coloured’ since the eighteenth century.
The name Lothario seems to have enjoyed a long-standing association with lecherous characters in literature that probably began with ‘The Impertinent Curiosity’, the story-within-the-story retold in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–15), in which Lothario is an unscrupulous rake who is coerced into seducing another man’s wife to test her fidelity. In turn, this Lothario is thought to have inspired another who appeared in Sir William Davenant’s play The Cruel Brother (1630), and yet another who featured in The Fair Penitent (1703) by the English dramatist Nicholas Rowe. It is Rowe’s play that is credited with popularizing the word as another name for a seducer of women in English in the mid-eighteenth century.
The sixteenth-century word pantaloons derives from the name of Pantaloon or Pantalone, a stock character of French and Italian comic theatre who is typically depicted as a scrawny, hunchbacked old man, dressed in long red tights (his pantaloons), a long black cloak or jacket and a hat. In the original Italian commedia dell’arte, Pantalone was often portrayed as the embodiment of greed, a rich yet miserly old widower or bachelor. His name was likely taken from that of St Pantaleon, one of the saints of the Republic of Venice, as at the time Venetian merchants were widely known for their prosperity.
Describing a bookish and often socially inept young man, the word poindexter was first recorded in English in 1981. It derives from the name of a character who first appeared in the popular US animated series Felix the Cat in 1959. A nerdy nephew of the Professor, Felix’s adversary, Poindexter was portrayed as a short young boy wearing a mortar board, thick round glasses and a lab coat. According to the show’s producer and animator Joe Oriolo, the character was named after his lawyer.
The word rodomontade is used in English to mean ‘boastful, pretentious blather’, or else is used as another name for a vain and bragging person. First recorded in this sense in the late sixteenth century, the word was borrowed via French from the Italian Rodomonte, the name of a pompous, arrogant character in the epic Renaissance poem Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love) written in the late 1400s.
The title character in a children’s story written by the German writer Heinrich Hoffmann, the name Struwwelpeter is used in English to describe someone with unkempt and uncontrollable hair, a sense first recorded in 1909. In the original tale, Struwwelpeter (usually translated into English as ‘tousle-headed Peter’) is a young boy who ‘never once has cut his hair’ or his fingernails which are long and ‘grimed as black as soot’. His is one of several stories – along with those of ‘Cruel Frederick’, a boy who tears the wings off flies, and ‘The Wild Huntsman’, who is hunted by a hare who has stolen his gun – which Hoffmann originally published in a collection known as Merry Stories and Funny Pictures in 1845.
The word Svengali has been used in English to describe a person who has control or influence over another, particularly via some sinister or mesmeric means, since the early 1900s. It is taken from the name of a villainous character in Trilby (1894), a novel by the French writer and cartoonist George du Maurier (grandfather of the English authoress Daphne du Maurier). In the story Svengali is a great musician and hypnotist who transforms the title character into a magnificent and hugely successful singer, but leaves her utterly unable to perform without his powers and ultimately asserts complete control over her life.
A Wellerism is a type of expression in which an existing saying or cliché is given a humorously alternative meaning by being placed in an unusual context. The term is derived from the name of the popular character of Sam Weller, Mr Pickwick’s witty manservant in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837), who would typically make observations (in his cockney accent) like ‘[what] I call addin’ insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English langvidge arterwards’. The term Wellerism was first recorded in English just two years after publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1839, indicating just how popular a character Sam was amongst Dickens’s readership. Indeed, when the novel was first serialized in monthly instalments from March 1836 to October 1837, sales reportedly increased from 500 to 40,000 a month after Sam made his first appearance in Chapter 10.