Five ways Dickens expanded the English language
After Shakespeare, Charles Dickens has been the writer who most expanded the vocabulary we use.
Among the 9,218 quotations from {Dickens’} works in the OED, 265 words and compounds are cited as having been first used by him in print and another 1,586 as having been used in a new sense. SourceHere are five ways Dickens added to our vocabulary
1. By popularising previously unused or obscure words and phrases. Dustbin was in existence before Dombey and Son, for example, while boredom precedes Bleak House. But neither word was commonly used.
2. Introducing street-slang to the general reading public. His first novel The Pickwick Papers (1837) popularised butterfingers (clumsy), flummox (bewilder/confuse) and sawbones (surgeon).
Mr Waller comments draws attention to the vocabulary building process:
What! Don’t you know what a sawbones is, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller. ‘I thought everybody know’d as a sawbones was a surgeon.’ — Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837
3. Expanding idiomatic English. Two examples from Bleak House:
not to put too fine a point on it Mr Snagsby
you have got that person's number Mr Bucket.
4. Using existing words to create convincing new ones. Most frequently this involves converting adjectives to nouns: messy to messiness and creepy to the creeps:
She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps’. — Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837
5. Vivid characterisation created numerous eponyms -Dickensian names: Scrooge, McCawber, Gradgrind, Bumble instantly evoke specific character traits