An Abridged History

AN ABRIDGED HISTORY

  The origin of words has always been an interesting topic. We speak on average up to 25,000 words each day, but do any of us know from whence they come? Some are Greek and Latin of root; others from the Germanic or romantic branches of the linguistic tree. When God spoke to Adam and Adam uttered history’s first reply, the evolution (or etymology) of words began.
  The longest word in the English language is the 29-letter floccinaucinihilipilification. Not many people use this redunant term which ioronically means ‘to estimate something as worthless’.   It makes you wonder what it takes for a words to morph into something like this line-filler. And why don’t we take a leaf out of Germany’s book and run all our words together? Their longest official word is:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsges

etz.
This is made up of 8 different words and translates as: ‘Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law’.
  I think a bit of neologism – the coining of a new word – has gone on here.   Such words are formed through the processes of portmanteau – the joining of words to form another word – or apocopation; from the Greek, meaning to cut away at a word’s structure.   ‘Camcorder’ is a prime example we can relate to. Its makeup consists of camera + recorder. If we want to get fancy though, we nowadays have words like ‘Bling’, ‘Brangelina’ and ‘Watergate’ entering mainstream usage. Common names have also been tidied up. Andrew becomes Andy, Teresa becomes Tess and Ellen becomes Nell. Then you have Morn for Morning, Cinema for Cinematography and Photo for Photograph.

Imagine the possibilitites if we were to invent our own new words. We would find dictironary entries for:
Soonerratherthanlater
Assoonaspossible
Everyonceinawhile
Shellberightmate
  In contrast to these bundles of joy are those words that really aren’t; words, that is. They are considered non-words; the most famous of which is...