Not in fact a misunderstanding of «word is bond». It means that something is a new and important idea. It has been in common usage at least since the release of the aptly titled Run DMC song «Word is Born» (1990).
Well I’m long gone, word is born…
by Fat Cass October 26, 2005
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word is born
A street saying equivalent to no cap. Only OGs use this one.
Friend: That was one hot chick
Me: Damn, word is born yo.
by ya boi 02aku February 3, 2020
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word is born
«Word is born» means «truth be told» or «the truth is spoken», as in the Logos (Greek, for «word») of the New Testament. «In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.» (John 1:1, NIV) And then the Word says, «I am the way and the truth and the life,» in John 14:6. Don’t any of you go to church?
I saw that bitch go down on the pastor at church—word is born, yo!
by JTavisO July 5, 2011
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word is born
As mentioned, a misunderstanding of ‘word is bond’; as in «I am giving you my word, and it is my bond.»
Isn’t language beatiful.
«Dude, that was sweet!»
«Word is born!»
«..did you just say born?!»
by nick November 13, 2003
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Word is born..son!
A New York slang that means or can be translated to: I’m telling you the truth… man
Commonly used in phrases of excitement and news telling or sharing thoughts
Word is born..son! they have the new kicks at DR JAYS!
by back in the dayz May 20, 2009
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Word is born
A trio of words that can mean the same thing universally like any other symbol, word, phrase, equation, sound, frequesncy, etc…..the question is not could we speak, but should we?
I speak therefor I am = Word is born
by Priestly Incense January 23, 2023
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More random definitions
На основании Вашего запроса эти примеры могут содержать грубую лексику.
На основании Вашего запроса эти примеры могут содержать разговорную лексику.
рождается слово
слово рождается
In English, the new word is born every 90 minutes.
He called Him the Word, so that you would know that as the word is born from the mind without passion, so is He born from the Father without passion.
Для того назвал Его «Словом», чтобы ты знал, что как слово рождается от ума бесстрастно, так и Он рождается от Отца бесстрастно» [1, с.].
In English, the new word is born every 90 minutes.
Результатов: 5. Точных совпадений: 5. Затраченное время: 96 мс
Where do new words come from? How do you figure out their histories?
An etymology is the history of a linguistic form, such as a word; the same term is also used for the study
of word histories. A dictionary etymology tells us what is known of an English word before it became the word entered
in that dictionary. If the word was created in English, the etymology shows, to whatever extent is not already
obvious from the shape of the word, what materials were used to form it. If the word was borrowed into English,
the etymology traces the borrowing process backward from the point at which the word entered English to the
earliest records of the ancestral language. Where it is relevant, an etymology notes words from other languages that
are related («akin») to the word in the dictionary entry, but that are not in the direct line of borrowing.
How New Words are Formed
An etymologist, a specialist in the study of etymology, must know a good deal about the history of English
and also about the relationships of sound and meaning and their changes over time that underline the reconstruction
of the Indo-European language family. Knowledge is also needed of the various processes by which words are created
within Modern English; the most important processes are listed below.
Borrowing
A majority of the words used in English today are of foreign origin. English still derives much of its vocabulary
from Latin and Greek, but we have also borrowed words from nearly all of the languages in Europe. In the modern
period of linguistic acquisitiveness, English has found vocabulary opportunities even farther afield. From the
period of the Renaissance voyages through the days when the sun never set upon the British Empire and up to
the present, a steady stream of new words has flowed into the language to match the new objects and
experiences English speakers have encountered all over the globe. Over 120 languages are on record as sources
of present-day English vocabulary.
Shortening or Clipping
Clipping (or truncation) is a process whereby an appreciable chunk of an existing word is omitted,
leaving what is sometimes called a stump word. When it is the end of a word that is lopped off, the process
is called back-clipping: thus examination was docked to create exam and gymnasium
was shortened to form gym. Less common in English are fore-clippings, in which the beginning of a
word is dropped: thus phone from telephone. Very occasionally, we see a sort of fore-and-aft
clipping, such as flu, from influenza.
Functional Shift
A functional shift is the process by which an existing word or form comes to be used with another
grammatical function (often a different part of speech); an example of a functional shift would be the development
of the noun commute from the verb commute.
Back-formation
Back-formation occurs when a real or supposed affix (that is, a prefix or suffix) is removed from a word to
create a new one. For example, the original name for a type of fruit was cherise, but some thought that word
sounded plural, so they began to use what they believed to be a singular form, cherry, and a new word was
born. The creation of the the verb enthuse from the noun enthusiasm is also an example of a
back-formation.
Blends
A blend is a word made by combining other words or parts of words in such a way that they overlap (as
motel from motor plus hotel) or one is infixed into the other (as chortle from
snort plus chuckle — the -ort- of the first being surrounded by the ch-…-le
of the second). The term blend is also sometimes used to describe words like brunch, from
breakfast plus lunch, in which pieces of the word are joined but there is no actual overlap. The
essential feature of a blend in either case is that there be no point at which you can break the word with everything
to the left of the breaking being a morpheme (a separately meaningful, conventionally combinable element) and
everything to the right being a morpheme, and with the meaning of the blend-word being a function of the meaning of
these morphemes. Thus, birdcage and psychohistory are not blends, but are instead compounds.
Acronymic Formations
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a phrase. Some acronymic terms still clearly show their
alphabetic origins (consider FBI), but others are pronounced like words instead of as a succession of
letter names: thus NASA and NATO are pronounced as two syllable words. If the form is written
lowercase, there is no longer any formal clue that the word began life as an acronym: thus radar (‘radio
detecting and ranging’). Sometimes a form wavers between the two treatments: CAT scan pronounced either like
cat or C-A-T.
NOTE: No origin is more pleasing to the general reader than an acronymic one. Although acronymic etymologies are
perennially popular, many of them are based more in creative fancy than in fact. For an example of such an alleged
acronymic etymology, see the article on posh.
Transfer of Personal or Place Names
Over time, names of people, places, or things may become generalized vocabulary words. Thus did forsythia
develop from the name of botanist William Forsyth, silhouette from the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a
parsimonious French controller general of finances, and denim from serge de Nîmes (a fabric made
in Nîmes, France).
Imitation of Sounds
Words can also be created by onomatopoeia, the naming of things by a more or less exact reproduction of the
sound associated with it. Words such as buzz, hiss, guffaw, whiz, and
pop) are of imitative origin.
Folk Etymology
Folk etymology, also known as popular etymology, is the process whereby a word is altered so as to
resemble at least partially a more familiar word or words. Sometimes the process seems intended to «make sense of» a
borrowed foreign word using native resources: for example, the Late Latin febrigugia (a plant with medicinal
properties, etymologically ‘fever expeller’) was modified into English as feverfew.
Combining Word Elements
Also available to one who feels the need for a new word to name a new thing or express a new idea is the very
considerable store of prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms that already exist in English. Some of these are native
and others are borrowed from French, but the largest number have been taken directly from Latin or Greek, and they
have been combined in may different ways often without any special regard for matching two elements from the same
original language. The combination of these word elements has produced many scientific and technical terms of Modern
English.
Literary and Creative Coinages
Once in a while, a word is created spontaneously out of the creative play of sheer imagination. Words such as
boondoggle and googol are examples of such creative coinages, but most such inventive brand-new
words do not gain sufficiently widespread use to gain dictionary entry unless their coiner is well known enough so
his or her writings are read, quoted, and imitated. British author Lewis Carroll was renowned for coinages such
as jabberwocky, galumph, and runcible, but most such new words are destined to pass in
and out of existence with very little notice from most users of English.
An etymologist tracing the history of a dictionary entry must review the etymologies at existing main entries and
prepare such etymologies as are required for the main entries being added to the new edition. In the course of the
former activity, adjustments must sometimes be made either to incorporate a useful piece of information that has
been previously overlooked or to review the account of the word’s origin in light of new evidence. Such evidence
may be unearthed by the etymologist or may be the product of published research by other scholars. In writing new
etymologies, the etymologist must, of course, be alive to the possible languages from which a new term may have
been created or borrowed, and must be prepared to research and analyze a wide range of documented evidence and
published sources in tracing a word’s history. The etymologist must sift theories, often-conflicting theories of
greater or lesser likelihood, and try to evaluate the evidence conservatively but fairly to arrive at the soundest
possible etymology that the available information permits.
When all attempts to provide a satisfactory etymology have failed, an etymologist may have to declare that a word’s
origin is unknown. The label «origin unknown» in an etymology seldom means that the etymologist is unaware of various
speculations about the origin of a term, but instead usually means that no single theory conceived by the etymologist
or proposed by others is well enough backed by evidence to include in a serious work of reference, even when qualified
by «probably» or «perhaps.»
As dictionary publishers never tire of reminding us, our language is growing. Not content with the million or so words they already have at their disposal, English speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary debutants include blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk and Brexit.
But these represent just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg. According to Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print. Who invents these words, and how? What rules govern their formation? And what determines whether they catch on?
Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, because at least 500 words (including critic, swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works – but we have no way of knowing whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things he’d picked up elsewhere.
It’s generally agreed that the most prolific minter of words was John Milton, who gave us 630 coinages, including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium. Geoffrey Chaucer (universe, approach), Ben Jonson (rant, petulant), John Donne (self-preservation, valediction) and Sir Thomas More (atonement, anticipate) lag behind. It should come as no great surprise that writers are behind many of our lexical innovations. But the fact is, we have no idea who to credit for most of our lexicon.
If our knowledge of the who is limited, we have a rather fuller understanding of the how. All new words are created by one of 13 mechanisms:
1 Derivation
The commonest method of creating a new word is to add a prefix or suffix to an existing one. Hence realisation (1610s), democratise (1798), detonator (1822), preteen (1926), hyperlink (1987) and monogamish (2011).
2 Back formation
The inverse of the above: the creation of a new root word by the removal of a phantom affix. The noun sleaze, for example, was back-formed from “sleazy” in about 1967. A similar process brought about pea, liaise, enthuse, aggress and donate. Some linguists propose a separate category for lexicalisation, the turning of an affix into a word (ism, ology, teen), but it’s really just a type of back formation.
3 Compounding
The juxtaposition of two existing words. Typically, compound words begin life as separate entities, then get hitched with a hyphen, and eventually become a single unit. It’s mostly nouns that are formed this way (fiddlestick, claptrap, carbon dating, bailout), but words from other classes can be smooshed together too: into (preposition), nobody (pronoun), daydream (verb), awe-inspiring, environmentally friendly (adjectives).
4 Repurposing
Taking a word from one context and applying it to another. Thus the crane, meaning lifting machine, got its name from the long-necked bird, and the computer mouse was named after the long-tailed animal.
5 Conversion
Taking a word from one word class and transplanting it to another. The word giant was for a long time just a noun, meaning a creature of enormous size, until the early 15th century, when people began using it as an adjective. Thanks to social media, a similar fate has recently befallen friend, which can now serve as a verb as well as a noun (“Why didn’t you friend me?”).
6 Eponyms
Words named after a person or place. You may recognise Alzheimer’s, atlas, cheddar, alsatian, diesel, sandwich, mentor, svengali, wellington and boycott as eponyms – but did you know that gun, dunce, bigot, bugger, cretin, currant, hooligan, marmalade, maudlin, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, tawdry, doggerel, doily and sideburns are too? (The issue of whether, and for how long, to retain the capital letters on eponyms is a thorny one.)
7 Abbreviations
An increasingly popular method. There are three main subtypes: clippings, acronyms and initialisms. Some words that you might not have known started out longer are pram (perambulator), taxi/cab (both from taximeter cabriolet), mob (mobile vulgus), goodbye (God be with you), berk (Berkshire Hunt), rifle (rifled pistol), canter (Canterbury gallop), curio (curiosity), van (caravan), sport (disport), wig (periwig), laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and trump (triumph. Although it’s worth noting that there’s another, unrelated sense of trump: to fabricate, as in “trumped-up charge”).
8 Loanwords
Foreign speakers often complain that their language is being overrun with borrowings from English. But the fact is, English itself is a voracious word thief; linguist David Crystal reckons it’s half-inched words from at least 350 languages. Most words are borrowed from French, Latin and Greek; some of the more exotic provenances are Flemish (hunk), Romany (cushty), Portuguese (fetish), Nahuatl (tomato – via Spanish), Tahitian (tattoo), Russian (mammoth), Mayan (shark), Gaelic (slogan), Japanese (tycoon), West Turkic (horde), Walloon (rabbit) and Polynesian (taboo). Calques (flea market, brainwashing, loan word) are translations of borrowings.
9 Onomatopeia
The creation of a word by imitation of the sound it is supposed to make. Plop, ow, barf, cuckoo, bunch, bump and midge all originated this way.
10 Reduplication
The repetition, or near-repetition, of a word or sound. To this method we owe the likes of flip-flop, goody-goody, boo-boo, helter-skelter, picnic, claptrap, hanky-panky, hurly-burly, lovey-dovey, higgledy-piggledy, tom-tom, hip hop and cray-cray. (Willy-nilly, though, came to us via a contraction of “Will he, nill he”.)
11 Nonce words
Words pulled out of thin air, bearing little relation to any existing form. Confirmed examples are few and far between, but include quark (Murray Gell-Mann), bling (unknown) and fleek (Vine celebrity Kayla Newman).
12 Error
Misspellings, mishearings, mispronunciations and mistranscriptions rarely produce new words in their own right, but often lead to new forms in conjunction with other mechanisms. Scramble, for example, seems to have originated as a variant of scrabble; but over time, the two forms have taken on different meanings, so one word has now become two. Similarly, the words shit and science, thanks to a long sequence of shifts and errors, are both ultimately derived from the same root. And the now defunct word helpmeet, or helpmate, is the result of a Biblical boo-boo. In the King James version, the Latin adjutorium simile sibi was rendered as “an help meet for him” – that is, “a helper suitable for him”. Later editors, less familiar with the archaic sense of meet, took the phrase to be a word, and began hyphenating help-meet.
13 Portmanteaus
Compounding with a twist. Take one word, remove an arbitrary portion of it, then put in its place either a whole word, or a similarly clipped one. Thus were born sitcom, paratroops, internet, gazunder and sexting. (Note: some linguists call this process blending and reserve the term portmanteau for a particular subtype of blend. But since Lewis Carroll, who devised this sense of portmanteau, specifically defined it as having the broader meaning, I’m going to use the terms willy-nilly.)
Some words came about via a combination of methods: yuppie is the result of initialism ((y)oung and (up)wardly mobile) plus derivation (+ -ie); berk is a clipped eponym (Berkshire hunt); cop, in the sense of police officer, is an abbreviation of a derivation (copper derives from the northern British dialect verb cop, meaning to catch); and snarl-up is a conversion (verb to noun) of a compound (snarl + up).
The popularity of the various methods has waxed and waned through the ages. For long periods (1100-1500 and 1650-1900), borrowings from French were in vogue. In the 19th century, loanwords from Indian languages (bangle, bungalow, cot, juggernaut, jungle, loot, shampoo, thug) were the cat’s pyjamas. There was even a brief onslaught from Dutch and Flemish.
In the 20th century, quite a few newbies were generated by derivation, using the -ie (and -y) suffix: talkies, freebie, foodie, hippy, roomie, rookie, roofie, Munchie, Smartie, Crunchie, Furby, scrunchie. Abbreviations, though, were the preferred MO, perhaps because of the necessity in wartime of delivering your message ASAP. The passion for initialisms seems to be wearing off, perhaps because things have got a little confusing; PC, for example, can now mean politically correct, police constable, per cent, personal computer, parsec, post cibum, peace corps, postcard, professional corporation or printed circuit.
But today, when it comes to word formation, there’s only one player in town: the portmanteau. Is this a bodacious development – or a disastrophe? I’ll get the debate rolling tomorrow.
Twitter: @AndyBodle
Have you ever wondered where English words come from?
There are a whopping 171,476 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. From aardvark to zyzzyva, words come in all shapes and sizes.
In this post we’ll explore some of the mechanisms through which words are born and we’ll learn some interesting ‘word histories’ along the way!
Words abbreviated
An acronym is a word made up of the first letter of other words. For sure you’ll have seen ‘LOL’ (laugh out loud) and ‘ASAP’ (as soon as possible), but there are many other examples in the English language, old and new.
In fact, some quite common words are abbreviations in disguise. For example, ‘radar’ and the ‘scuba’ in scuba-diving are both acronyms. The first comes from ‘RAdio Detection And Ranging’ and the second stands for ‘Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus’. Both terms have been around for more than 50 years.
Since the invention of text messaging or Short Message Systems (SMS), there has been an explosion of acronyms. There are so many new ones, it’s hard to keep up!
What do you think these ones mean?
- IMHO
- NSFW
- LMK
- MTFBWY
(answers at the end of the article)*
Words combined
English belongs to the Germanic family of languages. One of the things Germanic languages have in common is a profound love of compound words. These are words consisting of two (or more) smaller words.
When it comes to compound words, the Germans lead the way. See if you can say this one without stopping to breathe!
“Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft”
(See more about this word in Wikipedia)
Why say something in 10 words when you can say it in one?! OK, so this is an extreme example, but English is full of compounds.
Here are some of our all-time favourites:
- Bookworm – someone devoted to reading
- Daydream – a series of nice thoughts that distract your attention from the present
- Ladybird – a little beetle, typically red or yellow with black spots
- Skyscraper – a tall building with many floors
- Underdog – a competitor with a small chance of winning
Words from sounds
Onomatopoeia – a complicated term for a very simple concept. It comes from Greek, via Latin, and literally means ‘word-making’. More specifically, it refers to the formation of a word from a sound.
There are many verbs in English that come from the sound you make when doing this action. Try reading these ones out loud – do you know them all?
- Burp /bɜːp/
- Cough /kɒf/
- Sneeze /sniːz/
- Spit /spɪt/
- Thump /θʌmp/
- Whisper /ˈwɪspə/
Of course, English isn’t the only language that creates words from sounds. In fact, some are incredibly similar between languages. One of the best examples of a ‘universal onomatopoeia’ comes from the world of ornithology.
The cuckoo, a medium-sized bird, is famous for two things. Firstly, for laying its eggs in other birds’ nests (very cheeky). Secondly, for its distinct call, from which it gets its name. No matter what language you speak, the chances are that the name for this bird will be more or less the same.
| Language | Name for ‘cuckoo’ |
|---|---|
| Azerbaijani | ququ |
| Basque | kuku |
| Italian | cuculo |
| Kazakh | көкек |
| Turkish | guguk |
However, this is not the case for all sound words. From one country to another, the noises that animals don’t change all that much. But, for some reason, there’s enormous variety in how animal noises are represented across different languages. Check out this cool video about it!
Words from brands
We live in a material world and this is reflected in language. Sometimes companies and products gain so much popularity that a specific brand name becomes the general word for an object or action.
Have you ever heard someone go into a stationery shop and ask for ‘multi-coloured, sticky squares of paper’? No, we simply say Post-it Notes.
How about taking a ‘insulating vacuum storage flask’ on a camping holiday? It’s a lot easier to call it a Thermos.
So, the next time someone asks you a silly question, just tell them to Google it!
If you enjoyed reading about where words come from, you might find this post interesting – Myths and Mysteries of the English Language.
Glossary for Language Learners
Find the following words in the article and then write down any new ones you didn’t know.
Whopping (adj): very large.
Aardvark (n): a nocturnal mammal from Africa.
Zyzzyva (n): a South American beetle.
To stand for (pv): to be an abbreviation for.
To keep up (pv): to move at the same speed as something else.
Ornithology (n): the scientific study of birds
The chances are (exp): it is likely.
Stationery shop (n): a shop where you can buy writing materials and office supplies.
Key
adj = adjective
n = noun
Pv = phrasal verb
exp = expression
*answers to the acronyms…
IMHO: ‘in my humble opinion’ can be used when leaving comments on websites).
NSFW: ‘not safe for work’ indicates that an article or video is not appropriate for the workplace.
LMK: ‘let me know’ is a relaxed way of asking for information.
MTFBWY: ‘may the force be with you’ is an epic way to wish someone good luck!
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