Caution needs to be exercised in regards to claims of coinage as the data contained a number of examples of writers professing the invention of a term that had actually been in existence for many years.

Most importantly perhaps, it is evident that the impression of archaicity which any reader will experience on reading The Lord of the Rings is partly due to three simple lexical causes: the “overuse” of words borrowed from nineteenth-century fiction (e.g. yonder, journey [v], topmost), the avoidance of words associated with the modern world and the comparatively dense use of new coinages, unusual grammatical patterns, rare or obsolescent words.

Coinage

Meaning

Noun

Origin

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