Dot Wordsworth

What’s the word for a word that’s been used only once?

issue 12 October 2019

It is easy to speak a sentence never spoken before since the world came fresh from its mould. It’s not so easy to say a word unsaid by any other lips.

In its second edition (1989) the Oxford English Dictionary recorded numbskullism with a single illustrative quotation, from Anne Seward, a younger contemporary of Samuel Johnson’s from Lichfield, who wrote of the numbskullism of George I and George II. In a revision of 2000, the OED adds a citation from a video game newsletter. Any old body could use it now. There remains numskullity, unattested since Jeremy Bentham used it in 1779 — until now, that is.

Since English employs a gamut of suffixes, there is hardly a limit to the words to whichism ority could be added. What we prefer is a lively, independent word with a well-fenced semantic field of its own to gambol in.

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