Speakers of English are adept at creating new terms by stringing together parts of other words. This is often accomplished by tacking a prefix onto the beginning of a word (as in prosocial or microtransaction), or by appending a suffix to a word’s end (as in bracketology or bingeable).

There are no rules that govern this process. If the resulting construction is useful—that is, if it fills some gap in the language—then the new term may catch on more broadly. It might even make it to the linguistic big leagues and be added to the dictionary. Predicting which constructions will become enduringly popular, however, isn’t easy.

Consider bridezilla. This term for a soon-to-be-married woman behaving badly—and sometimes very badly—has clearly become a card-carrying member of our English vocabulary. It was, however, coined relatively recently, first appearing in a 1995 Boston Globe article entitled “Tacky Trips Down the Aisle.” Its rise in popularity was undoubtedly assisted by the WE TV series Bridezillas, which aired from 2004 to 2013.

-Zilla, of course, is the back half of Godzilla, the monster that first appeared on Japanese movie screens seventy years ago. Accounts vary, but its name may derive from a combination of the Japanese words for “gorilla” (gorira) and “whale” (kujira). The result—Gujira—was homogenized into “Godzilla” for export purposes.

But how has........

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