Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER, Speaking of Words

            If you count chemical names such as dimethylformamide and monothioglycerol, or medicines such as rivaroxaban and zanubrutinib, you would think the number of possible English words is effectively infinite, even if you place a limit on the number of syllables they can have.  But there is another limit besides length: they have to be pronounceable using English sounds (or phonemes).  These four examples may not trip readily off the tongue, but they are pronounceable without special effort or instruction; you might hesitate over where to place the main stress, but even that should suggest itself: the third-last syllable.

            More interesting than these complicated concoctions, I think, are little words, words of one or two syllables, that go back centuries, or seem as if they could go back centuries, to good old Middle or Old English.  When bling was introduced a few years ago, it was a perfectly acceptable English word because it was easy to pronounce, that is, it obeyed the rules of English sound-combination, which linguists call phonotactic rules.  It could have been a very old word.  There is no problem with bling because we already have lots of bl– words such as black, blue, blind, blood, and blister, and lots of words that rhyme with it such as fling, wing, sing, sting, and string. 

            English would not allow bding, pting, bwing, pwing, psing, stwing, and several other words beginning with such consonant clusters.  We can pronounce these if we make an effort, but they are not natural or normal in English.  They are normal in other languages—Greek has no trouble with bd-, pt– and ps-, for example—but not in English.

            Many little words come in sets or families.  Take the set blVd, for example, where V stands for a vowel sound (not necessarily a single letter).  We have blade, bleed, bled, and blood, so there are several vacancies for new inventions: blad, blid, blod, blide, blude, and blode, for instance.  These would all be welcomed as members of the family.  In fact blad used to exist, and lingers on as a technical term in the book business, and blid was, and may still be, a dialectal variant of blood.  But in standard American English, at least, there are six or more openings in this little set.

            An even simpler set is mVd.  We have mad, made (and maid), med (< medicine), mead (and meed), mid, mod, mode, mood, and mud.  That’s nearly a full house, but mide would be available if we need it, and maybe mawd, though it sounds like a female name. 

The set bVd also has few vacancies.  We have bad (also spelled bade, past tense of bid), bed, bead (and beed), bid, bide, bod (< body), bode, bawd (and baud), and bud.  So baid and bood are available.

When bling arrived it found its lodging empty: there was no bleng or blong to greet it.  But bling has already become a verb, and lovers of English “strong” verbs might well make blang the past tense and blung the perfect participle, on the model of sing-sang-sung or (much closer, alas) bring-brang-brung.

Many two-syllable words also come in families, such as bVTer, where T stands for t or tt.  So we have batter, better, beater, bitter, biter, boater, booter, and butter, with just a gap or two.  Blander, blender, blinder, blonder, and blunder exist, a full set, except that blinder has a diphthong for a vowel: it does not rhyme with tinder.  Spelling can be a distraction: basket and biscuit belong together, despite appearances.

This is a game anyone can play who is fluent in English.  When you’ve run out of crossword puzzles and are bored with Scrabble, give it a try. 

Quantifying the openings for new words is quite difficult, however, since we don’t even know—well, maybe someone has figured it out—how many one-syllable or two-syllable sets there are to begin with, let alone the average number of unfilled slots.  But there must be many thousands of potential words like bood and busket just waiting to be given a meaning.  (Those two might make good names for a pair of dogs, if you’re desperate.)  And that’s not counting those extravagant inventions like prosinafactulanib, which I just made up.

            I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.  Website: michaelkferber.com.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.