Thematic and Structural Features of English Neologisms of the Second Decade of the 21st Century

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse new words that appeared in the English language during the second decade of the 21st century and were posted on a special blog page of the Cambridge online dictionaries website. Currently, hundreds on new words appear every day in the English language due to the rapid development of society, and they quickly spread around the world thanks to the Internet. The paper outlines different approaches to understanding and defining a neologism, the most common fields of neologisms' appearance, and word-formation mechanisms. As the new words reflect the current trends in different spheres of life, this study aims to examine what phenomena new words appeared during 2011-2020 describe. The results reveal that most neologisms refer to such thematic groups as society, technology, economy, environment, and politics. Furthermore, the paper analyses structural features of neologisms and concludes that they are commonly formed by several main mechanisms. Most of them are compounds. Other methods include blending, affixation, acronyms, conversion, clipping. All the findings are supplemented with definitions.