Around 1900, in New Berlin, Ohio, a department-store worker named J. Murray Spangler invented a device which he called an electric suction sweeper. This device eventually became very popular and could have been known as a spangler. People could have been spanglering their floors or they might even have spanglered their rugs and curtains. The use could have extended to a type of person who droned on and on (and really sucked), described as spanglerish, or to a whole style of behavior called spanglerism. However, none of that happened. Instead, Mr. Spangler sold his new invention to a local businessman called William H. Hoover, whose Hoover Suction Sweeper Company produced the first machine called a “Hoover.” Not only did the word hoover (without a capital letter) become as familiar as vacuum cleaner all over the world, but in Britain, people still talk about hoovering (and not spanglering) their carpets.

The point of this small tale is that, although we had never heard of Mr. Spangler before, we really had no difficulty coping with the new words: spangler, spanglerish, spanglerism, spanglering or spanglered. That is, we can very quickly understand a new word in our language (a neologism) and accept the use of different forms of that new word. This ability must derive in part from the fact that there is a lot of regularity in the word-formation processes in a language. In this chapter, we will explore some of the basic processes by which new words are created.