Understanding the Meanings of New Words

So far we’ve looked at how English makes new words (using prefixes, suffixes, compounding, conversion, etc.). Now let’s look at what they actually mean.

The text focuses on two main types of words:

• Derived words (made with affixes — prefixes and suffixes)

• Compound words (made by joining two or more words)

Other Ways English Creates New Words

We already looked at the three most common methods: affixation (adding prefixes/suffixes), compounding (joining words), and conversion (changing a word’s job without changing its form), but there are other ways too… let’s take a look.

What is Conversion?

Conversion is another easy and very common way English creates new words.

It means: You take a word and change its job (word class) without changing the spelling or pronunciation at all.

The word stays exactly the same — only its function changes.

What are multi-word verbs (phrasal verbs)?

In English, we have something called multi-word verbs (also commonly called phrasal verbs). These are very common in everyday modern English.

When we break words into smaller meaningful parts, we usually find two main types:

• Free morphemes (can stand alone as words, e.g. answer, phone)

• Affixes (prefixes and suffixes that must be attached to something, e.g. un-, -ness, -ly)

But some words don’t fit neatly into these categories

A compound word is a new word created by joining two (or sometimes more) existing words together.

Affixation is a simple and very common way to create new words in English. Imagine you have a basic word (like "friend" or "happy"). You can add extra pieces to the start or end to change its meaning or even turn it into a different type of word. Those extra pieces are called affixes.

Affixes are "bound" — they can't stand alone as words. They need to attach to something else.

What is a morpheme and the two main types of morphemes.

Introduction to morphology. The study of how words are built inside their internal structure.

Conjunctions are connecting words in English. They help join words, phrases, or sentences together so our ideas flow better and make more sense.

Wh-words are a special group of English words that almost all start with ‘wh-’. They help us ask questions, give extra info about things, or express surprise/emphasis.

Prepositions are small but important words in English that help show how things connect or relate to each other in a sentence. They often tell us where something is, when something happens, why, or in what way.

Think of a preposition like a little bridge: it links a noun (or a group of words acting like a noun) to the rest of the sentence.

Auxiliary verbs are a small, special group of verbs that ‘help’ the main verb (the action or state word) in a sentence. They add extra information like tense (when something happens), questions, negatives, or possibilities.

Determiners are small, important words that come before a noun (or at the start of a noun phrase) to give extra information about that noun. They tell us things like:

Primary pronouns are small words that help us avoid repeating nouns or longer noun phrases (don’t worry we will talk about phrases soon in a coming post). Primary pronouns help us to avoid repeating words so our sentences don't sound repetitive or awkward. Also, the simple idea that a pronoun takes the place of a noun is partly true, but pronouns can do more than that – they can replace whole phrases, parts of phrases, or even stand alone.

Adverbs are one of the main parts of speech in English (along with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Remember N.V.A.A from our previous post?).

Adverbs are like ‘extra helpers’ in a sentence — they add more detail, but sentences can usually survive without them.

Adjectives form an important open class in English (distinct from nouns and verbs), though less central to sentence structure. They are traditionally called ‘describing words’, but this definition is imprecise since other word classes can also describe.

What do verbs do?

People sometimes call verbs ‘doing words’, but that's only partly true.

Verbs can describe two main things:

-       Actions / physical processes (called dynamic verbs)

-       States / feelings / situations (called stative verbs)

What is a noun?

A noun is basically a naming word. It names a person, place, thing, animal, or idea.

Many people learn it as ‘a naming word’ – and that's a good simple start! The word ‘noun’ even comes from a Latin word that means ‘name’.

Fun tip: ‘nombre’ means ‘noun’ in Spanish, but it also means ‘name’.

How many words in the English language?

That seems like it should be a relatively easy question to answer – just check a big dictionary, or ask chat GPT, right? Well, The Oxford English Dictionary (a super famous and detailed one, available online) has over 600,000 entries. That includes lots of old words that aren't used anymore. But even that huge number isn't the full story, and we can never get an exact count of every word in English today.