Curious Kids: who makes the words? Who decides what things like ‘trees’ and ‘shoes’ are called?

By Kate Burridge, Monash University

Who makes the words? Why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes and who makes the names? - Elliot, age 5, Eltham, Victoria

Good question Elliot!

Let’s start with the first part of the question: who makes words?

Well, there’s no official person or group that’s responsible for making words. New words are invented by all of us getting creative. Mostly, it’s a matter of reusing words, or parts of words, and transforming them into new products. Language is the ultimate recycler!

Creating words out of ‘tree’ and ‘shoe’

There are five main ways of building new words.

One is to add things called “suffixes”, which are letters we add to the ends of words to change their meaning slightly. By adding a “-y” to “tree” and “shoe”, we can make “treey” (to describe something with lots of trees) and “shoey” (to describe people drinking from a shoe, an odd but old tradition). There are also things called “prefixes”. These are letters that go at the front of a word. For example, the word “subtree” describes a kind of shrub, and “overshoes” are something worn over ordinary shoes.

It’s also possible to combine whole words to make new ones. We can even put “tree” and “shoe” together to create “shoe-tree”, which is a block of wood we put into shoes to keep their shape. These types of words are called “compound words” — they are often written as two words (“apple tree”), but sometimes one (“shoelace”). English has never sorted out the rules here.

A third process, and one that’s really popular these days, is “blending”. This is when we mix words together (sometimes they’re called “frankenwords”, itself a blend of “Frankenstein” and “word”). Here are two made-up blends based on “tree” and “shoe”. They don’t exist — yet (perhaps they’ll take off!).

• Treerific (“tree” has been squished with “terrific” to convey something wonderful that is related to trees)

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-who-makes-the-words-who-decides-what-things-like-trees-and-shoes-are-called-224263