Someone writes doomscrolling. A few years earlier, many readers might have needed an explanation. Now it is widely recognisable.
Someone else invents examnesia for the feeling that revision disappears the moment the paper arrives. You can probably understand it. But is it established English?
This gives us three useful ideas: nonce word, neologism and lexicalisation.
A word can be understandable before it is established, and established before it feels old.
Neologism is the broad category
A neologism is a new word/expression or a new meaning for an existing word. Lexical innovation can therefore involve a new form or a new sense.
A nonce word is more temporary
A nonce word is created for a particular occasion. A family might invent sock-hunting for the daily search for missing socks. The phrase can work perfectly without becoming general vocabulary.
Understandable does not mean lexicalised
A useful continuum is: possible → interpretable → repeated → socially recognised → conventional → lexicalised. Not every innovation reaches the end.
Lexicalisation creates stable vocabulary
Once speakers treat a form as a conventional lexical unit, they retrieve it rather than reconstructing it from scratch. Brunch is a classic example: its blend history remains, but the word functions independently.
Digital platforms accelerate diffusion
Recent corpus research on TikTok, X, Reddit and other platforms documents blending, compounding, conversion, acronyms and semantic shifts as productive neologism mechanisms. Digital spaces let us watch diffusion in near real time.
Frequency is not enough
A meme can appear thousands of times and vanish. Stronger evidence of lexicalisation includes distribution across speakers, stable meaning, longevity, grammatical integration and register knowledge.
Community-standard is not general-English standard
A gaming term can be completely conventional inside one community and nearly unknown elsewhere. Vocabulary knowledge therefore includes the community in which a form is established.
Dictionaries record use; they do not magically create words
Lexicographers observe sustained evidence before recording many new words or senses. Dictionary inclusion is evidence of conventionalisation, but specialist or emerging vocabulary can exist before a general learner dictionary lists it.
Dictionary inclusion does not erase register
A slang word can be dictionary-listed and still be unsuitable for a formal report or examination essay. Lexical existence and contextual appropriateness are different questions.
New words are built from old machinery
Compounding, blending, clipping, conversion and affixation make many neologisms structurally interpretable. Morphology gives a candidate meaning; current community use gives the final conventional sense.
Old words can gain new meanings
Viral expanded from biological usage into digital culture. Semantic neologisms can be harder to notice because the spelling is familiar and readers may retrieve only the older sense.
Most nonce words disappear — and that is fine
A temporary word can solve a local communication problem successfully without becoming permanent vocabulary. Not all lexical creativity needs to survive.
Singapore relevance
Students move among school English, Singapore English, global digital English, gaming, technology and multilingual home language. A term can be normal online and too informal for an essay. The useful skill is judging where the word is established.
A practical “real word” test
- Can you understand it?
- Do unrelated speakers use it?
- Is the meaning stable?
- Does it occur across contexts?
- Do dictionaries or specialist sources record it?
- What is the register?
Teacher-friendly diagnosis
Dictionary absolutism: absence treated as proof of impossibility.
Trend = standard error: viral slang treated as neutral formal English.
Morphology overconfidence: transparent structure treated as guaranteed meaning.
Community-scope error: fandom usage treated as general English.
Hilary Mantel as a high-level literary lens
A word that feels ordinary now may once have felt strange; a fashionable word may disappear. The transferable lesson is that language records which inventions communities decide to keep.
Connections eduKateAI can learn
one-off coinage → nonce word
new form/new sense → neologism
distributed stable use → conventionalisation
conventionalised item → lexicalisation
dictionary entry → evidence of usage, not creation event
The public principle is that vocabulary becomes established through community use over time, so a newly understandable form is not automatically a stable part of general English.