Where do new words come from?

A language that never sits still

Every word you know was new once. Somebody said it first, other people liked it, and it spread. English has been doing this for more than a thousand years, and it has not stopped. The Macquarie Dictionary, Australia's own dictionary, adds new words every year. Its ninth edition, published in 2023, added about 3,000 new entries, including doomscrolling and nepo baby.

Where do all these words come from? Linguists, the scientists who study language, have found that most new words are made in just a handful of ways. Let us look at the big ones.

Borrowing

English is a champion borrower. When speakers meet a new thing, they often take the word along with it. In the first 100 years after Europeans arrived in Australia, about 400 words were borrowed from around 80 Aboriginal languages. Kangaroo comes from Guugu Yimithirr, spoken near Cooktown, where James Cook's crew wrote it down in 1770. Boomerang, koala, wombat, dingo and wallaby come from Dharug, the language of the Sydney area. Kookaburra comes from Wiradjuri, a language of inland New South Wales, and quokka comes from Nyungar, in the south-west of Western Australia.

Borrowing stretches right around the world. Pyjamas came into English around 1800 from Hindi and Urdu, and before that from Persian words meaning 'leg garment'. Ketchup began as kê-chiap, a fish sauce in the Hokkien Chinese language, and travelled through Malay before English traders picked it up. The funny thing about a borrowed word, of course, is that nobody ever gives it back.

Sticking, squashing and chopping

The most common way to make a new English word is compounding: sticking two whole words together. Sunscreen, footpath, bushfire, laptop and skateboard are all compounds. A recent study of 932 words added to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary between 2020 and 2024 found that compounds were the biggest group.

Blending squashes two words together and drops some letters. Brunch was British student slang in 1896, mixing breakfast and lunch. Smog, from smoke and fog, first appeared in London in 1905. Motel comes from motor and hotel.

Clipping chops a long word short: phone from telephone, fridge from refrigerator, exam from examination. An acronym builds a word from first letters: scuba stands for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and dates from 1952. And some words are named after people. The sandwich is said to take its name from John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. The story goes that in the 1760s he liked to eat meat between slices of bread so that he did not have to leave the gaming table.

The Aussie -o and -ie

Australians have a famous habit of shortening words and adding a friendly ending. Arvo for afternoon dates from the 1920s. Servo, ambo and bottle-o follow the same pattern, and the -o ending goes back to the 1800s, when a milko delivered the milk. The -ie ending gives us barbie, brekkie, sunnies, trackies, firie and tradie.

Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist at the Australian National University, described these little words as one of the most noticeable features of Australian English. They are not laziness. They signal friendliness, and show that the speaker feels relaxed and at home.

One of them went global. The earliest known use of selfie is a post on an ABC online forum from September 2002, by an Australian describing a photo he took of himself after a fall. In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries named selfie its Word of the Year, pointing out that the cute -ie ending fitted the Australian habit perfectly.

How a word gets into the dictionary

Dictionary editors do not decide which words are 'real'. They watch and record. The Macquarie Dictionary says a word must prove that it has currency: it has to turn up a number of times, in a number of different contexts, over a period of time. Oxford's editors look for the same thing, with evidence from many different writers, not just one. A word your friends invented at lunch is not in yet. But if people across the country are still using it in a few years, it might be.

Each year, dictionaries also pick a Word of the Year that captures what people were talking about. For 2025, the Macquarie Dictionary chose AI slop, Oxford chose rage bait, and the Australian National Dictionary Centre at ANU chose social media ban. Who knows which word that is brand new today will be in the dictionary by the time you finish school?

📚 Words to know

Borrowed word

A word taken from another language, such as kangaroo, pyjamas or piano. Also called a loanword.

Blend

A word squashed together from parts of two others, such as brunch or smog.

Compound

A word made by joining two whole words, such as footpath or sunscreen.

Clipping

A word made by chopping a longer one short, such as fridge or exam.

Lexicographer

A person who writes and edits dictionaries.

🧪 Try this: start a word box

1. Dictionary makers keep files of evidence for every new word. Start your own. For one week, write down any word or phrase you hear that you have never seen in a dictionary: at school, at home, in games or online.
2. Next to each word, note who said it, where, and what you think it means. Then try to work out how it was made. Is it a borrowing, a blend, a compound, a clipping or an acronym?
3. Count how many different people and places each word turns up in. That is what editors call currency. A word only one friend uses would not make the dictionary yet.
4. Look up your words in a school or online dictionary. Are any already in? Then look up five everyday words, such as pyjamas, kangaroo or sandwich, and read where they came from. Most good dictionaries list a word's origin at the end of its entry.
5. Invent a word of your own by blending or compounding two others, and see whether your class is still using it by the end of term.