In order to know the meaning of the term neologism, it is necessary, first of all, to discover its etymological origin. In this case, we can emphasize that it derives from Greek. Specifically, it is the result of the sum of three lexical components of that language:
-The word "neos", which means "new".
-The noun "logos", which can be translated as "word."
-The suffix «-ismós».
A neologism is a new word that arises in a language . It may even be a new meaning of a term or a different meaning.
Neologisms usually develop when a new reality emerges . A discovery or invention can lead to the creation of a neologism, since the vocabulary until now did not have a word to name what was unknown or non-existent.
It is important to keep in mind that a neologism, with the passage of time, loses this category. Robot , for example, was a neologism decades ago, although it is now a common noun that already has a long history in our language .
A neologism can arise by acronym (forming with the initials of different expressions), derivation (adding suffixes or prefixes), composition (joining different words) or parasynthesis (a combination of derivation and composition). Neologisms can be neologisms of meaning (a new meaning is given to an existing word) or neologisms of form (created by a morphological modification).
In addition to all the above, we cannot ignore that there are different types of neologisms. Specifically, among the most significant are the following:
-Semantic neologisms, which are those words that are already part of a language, but are now used in that language, but with another meaning. Examples of this are viral or search engine.
-Neologisms of form. These are those that originate from the morphological transformations of different words. This would be the case of photojournalism.
-Functional neologisms, which occur when in a language there is a need to introduce words in order to designate a situation, a thing... This group includes, for example, the so-called foreign words .
-Stylistic neologisms are those that are characterized because they are words that are shaped to try to give a more positive or sensitive tone to an expression that can be used frequently. This would be the case, for example, of blind people.
-Technological neologisms, which, as their name indicates, refer to elements related to technology and which, as a general rule, come from other languages. An example is selfie.
An example of a neologism is blogger . This is the name given to the individual who manages or develops a blog : a website similar to a personal diary, with content that is usually organized chronologically and that can receive comments from readers. Until the late 1990s , when this type of online sites began to become popular, the notion of blogger did not exist, since there were no people who carried out their activities.
Meme is another neologism. It was coined by the British Richard Dawkins in 1976 and today it is usually used to refer to the joke or caricature shared on the Internet to distort reality with a mocking objective.