Discombobulated, chortle and the art of making up words

Where do new words come from in particular languages? One obvious technique for vocabulary expansion is to borrow words from other languages, like recent English newcomers affogato (an Italian dessert) and kombucha (fermented tea), or older ones like pyjamas and bungalow. But otherwise this is a bit of a mystery, since people do not normally sit around just making up words for the fun of it rather than out of necessity – that is typically not how languages add to their stock of words. However, there are at least a handful of English-language words which do genuinely seem to have come into being in precisely this way, through several different processes.

One such word is discombobulated. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this item first appeared in print in 1834 in the USA, with the meaning of “disconcerted, embarrassed, made to feel (socially) uncomfortable”. It has been described as a “fanciful mock-Latin coinage” and was, of course, originally intended to be at least somewhat humorous. Initially, there were also a number of other variants of the word such as discomboberated and discombobracated, but these now seem to have disappeared.

The term coinage here makes it rather clear that when this word first arrived in English, it was newly created by someone. But notice that some of its elements were not actually new in themselves but rather were already securely established in English as possible building blocks for word-formation. Dis-, com– and –ulate existed well before 1834 in words such as disconcert, compose, and emulate, and were ready and waiting there to be brought into service when required.

Shakespeare himself is known to have coined a considerable number of new compound forms, such as lacklustre “lacking in brilliance or vitality”, eyesore “unpleasant to look at”, and bedroom for the more usual (at that time) term bed chamber or sleeping chamber.

More obvious coinages which use the technique of employing already existing units are so-called blended or “portmanteau” words such as chortle, a form which was invented by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) by combining chuckle (a quiet, soft laugh) with snort (a sudden, noisy puff of air through the nose); it first appeared in his 1871 poem Jabberwocky.

Another American lexical invention dating from the 1830s is conniption, particularly as used in the phrase conniption fit meaning “a hysterical outburst”. The phrase first appeared in print in the USA in around 1833, and was mainly used jocularly to refer to hysterical or excitable reactions, particularly on the part of Victorian women. One possibility is that it was derived from or influenced by Northern British and/or Irish dialectal forms such as carnaptious “bad tempered”, where car– operated as an intensifying prefix.