New words Archives

New words

Foredone and Dusted

From Useless Etymology, which will be published in October by John Murray Press. Starting in the fourteenth century, “meseems” was used sort of like the word “methinks,” but instead of…

The Sorrows of Young Wörter

Translated by John Sherman,

From a list compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language of more than a thousand German words that have been coined since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Lefty Lingo

by Lionel Shriver,

The only letter I’ve ever sent to the New York Times was in the 1980s, objecting to the paper’s suddenly pestilent use of “draconian.” During Iran–Contra the complaint must have…

Cite Unseen

From forty-nine citations that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to the book Meanderings of Memory, by an author known only as Nightlark, believed to have been published in 1852. In…