Did You Know?
NEOLOGISMS
New things are being invented or discovered all the time, so new names (nouns) are made up. We call these neologisms (from the Latin word neo, meaning new and logos, meaning word). We have often turned to Latin and Greek words to describe what has been invented (television - from tele, afar, and video, to see). Another way of creating a new word is to give the inventor's name to his/her invention (biro, watt). (We call those eponyms! Would you like to be remembered in an eponym?)
Some new words come from literature: a scrooge is a miserly person, named after Scrooge in A Christmas Carol; a 'catch-22' is an inescapable dilemma, as in the novel Catch-22; robots first appeared in Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot.
Other words come from acronyms - that is, taking the first letter of a number of words, as in laser (light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation); scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus); ABBA (Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and Anni-Frid). The KOBO e-reader takes its name from an anagram of BOOK.