You might have heard the uproar in March 2021 over the decision to stop publishing six Dr. Seuss books for racially insensitive imagery.
While this may not be a tremendous loss to literature, one of those books could claim a notable linguistic accomplishment.
If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, contains the first written instance of the word "nerd."
When authors create words for a one-time usage, they're known as nonce words.
Though it kind of sounds like "nonsense," the word nonce is actually a cognate of "once," as in, words to be used only once.
However, sometimes these single-usage words can pick up steam, becoming neologisms, terms that are still new and limited to certain fields.
And perhaps some of those will eventually make their way into our shared vocabulary as full-fledged words, becoming so common that we totally forget their literary origins.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky and this is Otherwords!
Okay, if we're talking about authors creating words, we have to address the 600 lb gorilla, the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.
At one time, he was credited with inventing over 2,000 English words, though that number has dwindled in recent years.
