Where words come from

The chapter “Where words come from” by Bill Bryson is about the words in the English language, how they were formed. The words were created by making them up, adding and subtracting from them, as well creating them by mistake and borrowing them from different languages. At the beginning in the chapter, Bryson speaks about words that are not very familiar, but they describe something that we know. Such as the word aposiopesis, this means sudden breaking off of thought. English language has the richest vocabulary, for example it has one word with many meanings, term known as polysemy, and has several words meaning the same thing. It is very interesting how some words can be created by mishearing, such as the word sweetard, now known as sweetheart. Some of the words were formed by misreading and typographical errors. There are words that were formed with back-formation, for example beg from beggar, and laze from lazy. For so many years the English language has been borrowing words from every language, such as ketchup from China, sofa from Arabia, potato from Haiti. But many borrowed words get anglicized, and we can’t even notice that they are borrowed from other languages, like the word bankrupt, taken from Italian word, banka rotta, which means “broken bench”. In the English language for so long there was a word hound, but then a new word was created, which we are familiar with, the word dog. Like dog there are a lot of other words that were created through the centuries. The writer Shakespeare plays a big role in creating new words, some of them we use today, such as critical, monumental, radiance, excellent. Isaac Newton, Jeremy Bentham, Sir Thomas Elyot also created words that we use. Some words stay the same, but their meaning changes, strange but sometimes the meaning becomes opposite. A lot of words that were adopted from Latin changed their original meaning, such as the word nice, which originally was stupid and foolish. The words can also change by becoming more detailed, like starve, which original meaning was to die, and then was changed to die by hunger. With adding the prefixes and suffixes pre-, anti-, -ness, -able, a lot of new words can be created.