Here are three interesting words you don’t see every day: “selmelier,” “panjandrum,” and “octothorpe.” The first is a protologism, but not the other two. Those used to be neologisms, but aren’t any more. A “protologism” is a word that somebody coins — maybe for a particular purpose, maybe in the hope that it will become widely used.
The word “protologism” itself was a protologism not so long ago, and it still probably qualifies as a neologism. It was made up by Mikhail Epstein, who was the Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University at the time, which was 2005. Being a professor, he offered an explanation of it in a book, “The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto”:
“The protologism is a freshly minted word not yet widely accepted. It is a verbal prototype, which may eventually be adopted for public service or remain a whim of linguo-poetic imagination. … Every newly coined word, even if it is deliberately promoted for general or commercial use, has initially been a protologism; none can skip that infancy phase.“
That last bit seems a bit redundant; if a protologism is a word that’s just been made up, and all he’s saying is that a word that’s just been made up can’t avoid having been made up. But anyway, either in order to give his new word some instant credibility (or perhaps to make it resemble “neologism,” which has been around long enough not to be a neologism any more), he created the word from the Greek word “protos” (first), and “logos” (word). Or maybe it’s just a combination of “prototype” and “neologism.”
There aren’t, of course, any clear guidelines for when a word passes between the stages of being a protologism, a neologism, to…well, just a word. That last stage might be called a “koinologism,” because “koinos” is the Greek word for “common” — so there, “koinologism” is a “protologism” possibly on its way to becoming a “neologism”. It seems to be generally accepted (among the handful of people who bother to form an opinion about this) that all it takes for a word to pass out of the first phase is for it to be used a few times, hopefully by somebody else. As for the boundary between “proto-” and “neo-,” it’s probably a few years, and if you see the word again, it might have passed from one to the other.
One place to find a lot of words that started as protologisms is to look into trademarks that are now just part of the language. A trademark or brand name that’s passed into language, by the way, is called a “generonym,” which is enough of a neologism that you won’t find it in all that many dictionaries yet. “Aspirin,” “xerox,” and even “laundromat,” “granola,” and “zipper” started out as specific, trademarked product names. So did “heroin,” for that matter.
Another place to find them is in the annual contest run by the Washington Post — you don’t make up a whole new word for the contest; you just come up with a new meaning for an existing word. A couple of good entries are “coffee” (a person who is coughed on) and “lymph” (walking with a lisp).
Social media seems to be generating a new wave of protologisms that are turning into neologisms at a record pace. Take, for example, “troll” (in its social-media guise), “crowdsourcing,” “BFF,” and “LOL”. They’re new and also widely used. Internet searching seems to have the same effect; you can google new terms to find out what they mean. But wait; “google” was a protologism that by now is probably a generonym, and maybe not even a neologism any more, but a koinologism!
