What do you do when something ought to be a word but isn’t yet?

You’re typing in something you’ve written, and a little red line appears under it. You’re supposed to humbly backspace and obediently type something else instead, because the robots are always right.

Let’s say you’re writing about the sensory experience of walking on damp sand. You’re writing from the POV of an autistic child, so you need precision. “Grittiness” isn’t quite right; “powderiness” is way off. It’s not a static “roughness”, or a “crunch” exactly. “Grind” carries the wrong connotation, and even “grinding” sounds too active and doesn’t quite hit it: that miniature grindingness under the toes. . . . Oh drat, the invisible dictionary doesn’t like “grindingness”. It’s given you a red line, the signal to stop and correct your vocabulary and/or spelling.

Back in Shakespeare’s time, they didn’t have those red lines. You could write what you liked, coin new words when you needed them, and Shakespeare frequently did. According to a brief googling around, we owe about 1700 words of our language to William Shakespeare’s utter indifference to whether something was a word yet or not.

Be like Shakespeare. If it’s a good word, write it.

There are things that aren’t good words: Nucular, persay, thusly, grevious, or the mixing-up of near-homophones such as compliment and complement, prostate and prostrate. There’s a fuzzy boundary between sloppiness and inventiveness. A useful guideline is that anything that turns up in the speech of an American president is going to sound sloppy and ill-conceived.

What makes for a good word? It has to be needed in some way, in my opinion. It can’t just be a misreading or malapropism of a word already in existence. Here are a few possibilities:

1. It has onomatopoeia. It may have originated as an inarticulate sound of delight, disgust, greed or grumpiness, and stuck. In your family, at least. It stuck because it worked. You’ve prepared the goobies for your baby’s dinner, called out time for num-nums, and hoped they didn’t think your cooking was nerky.

2. It’s a whimsical back formation of an already existing word. “Underwhelming” began this way, a few decades ago. The original word, “overwhelm”, indicated the rising of water to submerge and sweep something away. The word drifted in meaning until it came to indicate a rush of emotion, usually a positive emotion in response to a surprising event. Once it had taken on that meaning, it seemed to ask for an opposite word to indicate an event that failed to produce the expected rush of emotion: “I was totally underwhelmed by her gift”, etc. And so we are now “underwhelmed”–something water could never have done to us in the literal sense.

3. It’s needed, momentarily at least, to complete a parallel or other construction tidily. You’re writing about the flotsam in a river, and it’s not all torn-up greenery; it’s a mixture of green and brown, so “brownery” needs to become a word.

I do it all the time. Do I get away with it? Well, usually. There have been publishers who edit my writing to adhere to Webster’s Dictionary or the electronic equivalent, but most of my made-up words stay put inside my stories, awaiting the remote but not unreal possibility that one of them might creep into general usage and make its way into the dictionary along with Shakespeare’s.

This first appeared in Fiona’s blog January 2025.

Fiona M Jones writes short, dark-themed fiction and nature-themed nonfiction/poetry. Her work is published everywhere except Antarctica, and most of it sits somewhere in here: https://fionamjones.wordpress.com/.