Five ways Dickens expands the English language
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. Source
1. Like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens popularised words which were previously unused or obscure. was in existence before Dombey and Son, for example, while boredom precedes Bleak House.
2. He introduced street-slang to the general reading public. His first novel The Pickwick Papers (1837) popularised butter-fingers (“a clumsy person”), flummox (“bewilder”).
Mr Waller comments draws attention to the 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. It is in the use of idioms where Dickens — not to put to fine a point on it (Mr Snagsby in Bleak House) — displays his genius. The phrase I’ve got his number (meaning: I understand how he’s trying to fool us)
4. He also uses existing words to create new ones - often converting adjectives to nouns: messy to messiness and creepy to the creeps (see below).
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. Dickens also has the most eponyms - words associated with his characters - of any writer. Their names - Scrooge, McCawber, Gradgrind, Bumble - instantly evoke specific character traits.