FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

This is a bit old now, and has changed meaning, but I like ‘bowl food’ (which I prefer to write as ‘bowlfood’. It’s in English, formed by compounding (though usually written as an open compound). I first saw it on pub menus & cookbooks in England around 15 years ago, to refer to the kind of ‘comfort food’ that comes in bowls–soups, stews, pastas. The earliest citation I can find is a cookbook Bowl Food: The New Comfort Food for People on the Move from 2002 (Murdoch Publishers, Australia). But by 2018 it was being used not for a big bowl of stew in a pub, but for little bowls of food at catered events (in place of canapes)–the most famous of which was Prince Harry & Meghan Markle’s wedding, after which there was more buzz about it. (You start seeing it in the US around 2016.) It’s not in most English dictionaries, but has made it to Collins’ crowd-sourced pages.

I am Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, in Brighton, England. I have published widely in the areas of lexicology, lexical semantics, and pragmatics, and am the author of Semantic Relations and the Lexicon (2003) and Lexical Meaning (2010) and The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English (2018). I am also Editor of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America.