Curious Kids: who makes the words? Who decides what things like ‘trees’ and ‘shoes’ are called?

Who makes the words? Why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes and who makes the names? - Elliot, age 5, Eltham, Victoria
Who makes the words? Why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes and who makes the names? - Elliot, age 5, Eltham, Victoria

• Let’s start with the first part of the question: who makes words?
• Well, there’s no official person or group that’s responsible for making words.
• Mostly, it’s a matter of reusing words, or parts of words, and transforming them into new products.

Creating words out of ‘tree’ and ‘shoe’

• One is to add things called “suffixes”, which are letters we add to the ends of words to change their meaning slightly.
• It’s also possible to combine whole words to make new ones.
• These types of words are called “compound words” — they are often written as two words (“apple tree”), but sometimes one (“shoelace”).
• This is when we mix words together (sometimes they’re called “frankenwords”, itself a blend of “Frankenstein” and “word”).

Treerific (“tree” has been squished with “terrific” to convey something wonderful that is related to trees)
Shoenicorn (“shoe” has been squished with “unicorn” to mean an unicorn with magical shoes)

• Words and parts of words can combine and recombine to create a never-ending number of new words.
• We can also build words from the first letters of other words.
• Finally, English is also a word pirate that steals words from other languages — more than 350 in fact.
• This term for this is “borrowing” — curious, because English has no intention of ever giving these words back!

Early examples of trees and shoes

• Okay, so what about the second part of the question: why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes?
• Here’s a very early example of “tree” from an ancient poem written more than a thousand years ago.

• This was spoken about 2,500 years ago, but unfortunately nothing survives of the language, or perhaps people weren’t into writing things down back then.
• We can go even further back in time to the grandparent of English — a language called “Proto-Indo-European”.

The very beginning of trees and shoes

• For centuries, people have wondered how words like “tree” and “shoe” were invented.
• There are lots of ideas around, but we’ll never know for sure because people have been speaking for more than 30,000 years.
• Remember what we could do earlier with just the two words “tree” and “shoe’!

Kate Burridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.