Charles Dickens invented the word ‘boredom’ and William Shakespeare gave us ‘bandit’ and gossip, along with over 1,700 other words that previously didn’t exist in the English vocabulary! So writers have a long history of inventing new words, it happens when we encounter a concept and have no way of expressing it. Poets also look at ways of using language and punctuation differently.
Try this out:
This creative wordplay exercise encourages you to invent new words, you’ll need some words to work with, so make four lists:
Put about ten words in each of the above categories, now play around, you could combine one of the nouns with one of the suffixes or prefixes to form a new word e.g. ‘nontable’ or turn one of the nouns into a verb and try it in a sentence e.g ‘he was fooding around the kitchen’.
You can repeat this exercise endlessly, bring new words and ideas into play – the more you experiment the more your mind opens up to different possibilities…..
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