Etymology, the study of the origin of words and their changing meanings, fascinates me. Yes, I will confess to being a reader of dictionaries, and of articles relating to word trends. That is how I came to read ‘From alright to zap: an A-Z of horrible words’ in the Guardian recently. But during an interesting read on the (many) word-horrors in modern parlance, I found my attention diverted by the following:

Sir Philip Sidney coined fear-babes and navel-string. Milton gave homefelt a whirl. Gerard Manley Hopkins tried spendsavour; James Joyce, smilesmirk; John Clare, whopstraw. Yet more encouragingly, many of the efforts of our greatest writers have stuck. Shakespeare is also credited with giving us lacklustre, eyeball, dewdrop and fairyland; Sidney, with inventing the deathblow. Milton appears to have coined awestruck; Dryden, daydream; Coleridge, soulmate.

How amazing, I thought, to write so powerfully that a word from your own imagination is picked up and carried, on and on, until it is so commonplace that its origin is little considered. I wondered: what other words that are in common usage today were coined by writers? I decided to do a little research, and this is what I discovered:

We have Roald Dahl to thank for the word gremlin. Although he did not invent it, he first used the word that he had learned in the RAF in a published work, and created the associations we have with it today.

John Milton made the word pandemonium, a fusion of the Greek pan (all) and daimon (evil spirit), to mean ‘a place for all demons’.

Lewis Carroll created the chortle, a part chuckle, part snort, in Through the Looking-Glass.

Until William Wordsworth coined the noun pedestrian in 1791, there was no neat way to describe a person on foot.

We have Alfred Lord Tennyson to thank for airy-fairy and Henry Carey to thank for namby-pamby, Homer for mentor and Horace Walpole for serendipity.

No doubt none of these writers knew the legacy they were creating; they were simply creating the best-fit word for the sense they wished to convey.

Some authors today have a lot of fun following in these footsteps and inventing their own words (most notably Roald Dahl in The BFG), with varying degrees of success in uptake. JK Rowling’s muggle (to mean a non-magical person) has been hugely successful, but her new no-maj equivalent to mean American muggles has been contentious. No matter much JK Rowling writes, however, she will struggle to influence language to the degree of the bard, for Shakespeare is credited with having invented more than 1,700 words in the English language, many of which are very common indeed:

Personally, I do not seek to add to the dictionary, but I do enjoy using the many words available to me when I write. There is something infinitely pleasurable about selecting a word; the shape and rhythm and sound and feel – all these matter. It’s quite splendiferous!