The English language has a great capacity to create new words and new meanings from existing words. Perhaps we can say that language is like lego: endlessly moveable and with timeless appeal. The forms of words can change over time, inserting or removing hyphens and spaces, dropping letters and fusing into a single unit. Even just consider that slender super computer most of us pocket and pore over every day: the phone. What once was clunkily referred to as a mobile telephone has been shortened first to mobile and now simply to phone (because tele wasn’t catchy enough…and sounds too similar to another, larger entertainment screen!).
One of the more common ways we form new words in English is by putting together two (or more!) existing words together to form a new word with a new meaning. This is technically known as a lexical item or lexical unit. This means that, more often than not, our Word of the Year can look at first glance like it’s two words.
However, a ‘word’ is essentially the item that you look up in the dictionary to find the meaning. Therefore, it can be made up of more than one element (we have well established two-element words to which we never bat an eyelid: doorframe, suitcase, drink bottle (a bottle can be of anything otherwise!)
Sometimes on our list of the year’s candidates for the Word of the year, we have blended words, known as portmanteaus. For example tokenomics [token + economics], tradwife [traditional + wife] or slopaganda [slop + propaganda].
Sometimes words receive affixes, as in lemonading, redpilled or artefacting.
Or, somewhat less dramatically, words are simply placed next to each other, as in cuddle bed, black elephant or aura farming.
In other instances a hyphen may be used to keep things a little cleaner (six—(do you know what’s coming??)–seven, yep, we said it: six-seven), or words may be borrowed from another language. And of course there are also backformations.
So there we have it. A sneak peak into the longlist for the soon-to-be announced Word of the Year 2025 campaign. When does a word become a word? When it carries a distinctive meaning all of its own. And sometimes that takes more than one existing word, when we’re in the business of language change.
