Since 2005, I have had sixth graders in my classroom inventing and creating new words as part of our Word Origin unit. That’s 15 years of making words. Which is pretty cool. And even cooler, I think, is that each year, every student contributes a new word the online Crazy Collaborative Dictionary, which now boasts about 1,000 invented words.
In recent years, I’ve added a podcast element, so every student contributor’s voice is now embedded as part of the dictionary, a time capsule of sound. Even cooler. I’ve written before, too, about the element of “collaboration across time” here, with siblings working with siblings, but years later — sometimes, many many years later. Of all, this is the most interesting.
The dictionary has had a few homes over the years, from wikis that are no longer around, to a Google Doc one year, and now it is part of our class weblog site, The Electronic Pencil.
The above word cloud image is most of this year’s new word collection (a few stragglers didn’t make it to the image). Here are a few of my favorites from this year’s addition of about 75 new words (every student invents three new words but only “donates” one of their words to this project).
- Clickshen (2019) — A person who clicks on too many things on a computer or laptop (listen to the podcast)
- Fingerlashitis (2019) — A disease in which your finger nails are eyelashes and eyelashes are finger nails (listen to the podcast)
- Googleitis (2019) — The sickness/act of asking all your problems on Google (listen to the podcast)
- Leverything (2019) — When you laugh at everything (listen to the podcast)
- Pufalufa (2019) — A fluffy animal that shrinks when you wash it and turns into a vacuum cleaner (listen to the podcast)
- Swumming (2019) — Snowing in the summer (listen to the podcast)
- Xyblonked (2019) — When you hit your head on a rectangular shaped object (listen to the podcast)
Peace (in any name available),
Kevin