Protologism

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title: "Protologism" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["2000s-neologisms", "lexicology", "terminology", "neologisms", "linguistic-theories-and-hypotheses", "literary-theory", "linguistic-morphology"] description: "New word that has not yet been independently published" topic_path: "general/2000s-neologisms" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protologism" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary New word that has not yet been independently published ::

In linguistics, a protologism is a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but has not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners. The word may be proposed, may be extremely new, or may be established only within a very limited group of people.

A protologism becomes a neologism as soon as it appears in published press, on a website, or in a book, independently of the coiner—though, most definitively, in a dictionary. A word whose developmental stage is between that of a protologism (freshly coined) and a neologism (a new word) is a prelogism.

Overview

Protologisms constitute one stage in the development of neologisms. A protologism is coined to fill a gap in the language, with the hope of its becoming an accepted word. As an example, when the word protologism itself was coined—in 2003 by the American literary theorist Mikhail Epstein—it was autological: an example of the thing it describes.

About the concept and his name for it, Epstein wrote:

According to Epstein, every word in use started out as a protologism, subsequently became a neologism, and then gradually grew to be part of the language.

There is no fixed rule determining when a protologism becomes a stable neologism, and according to Kerry Maxwell, author of Brave New Words:

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In science

It has been suggested protologisms are needed in scientific fields, particularly in the life sciences, where very complex interactions between partially understood components produce higher order phenomena. Nevertheless, until the unappreciated concept in question has been thoroughly investigated and shown to be a real phenomenon, it is improbable that the term would be used by anyone other than its creator and achieve the status of neologism.

Notes

References

References

1. Lysanets, Yu V., and K. H. Havrylieva. "Medical neologisms in the british mass media discourse." (2017).
2. Simatupang, E. C. M., & Heryono, H. (2022). New-word formation and social disruption on metaverse. English Review: Journal of English Education, 10(3), 1019. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6722.
3. (2018). "Lexical Innovation in World Englishes: Cross-fertilization and Evolving Paradigms". Routledge.

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