Fun for Friday: New Words by Year
Ever wonder what words were “born” the same year as you? With Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler, you can find out! Just pick your birth year (or a year you’re interested in) from the dropdown menu and skim through the results! The results are specifically words in print, so it’s possible that a word was in the spoken language prior to the year it appeared in print, but it should give you a pretty good ballpark estimate of when words came into the English language.
You can go back as early as 1500 for a specific year, but you can also look at a handful of centuries prior to that. So if you’re writing historical fiction, you can even look at new words for a given year, which might help you find ideas for what people would have been talking about at the time!
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