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Chinese Neologisms
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To Appear in Huang, Chu-Ren, Z. Jing-Schmidt & B. Meisterernst (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Chinese
Applied Linguistics. London/New York: Routledge
Chinese Neologisms
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt Shu-Kai Hsieh

University of Oregon National Taiwan University
Abstract
Human societies change over time. When new ideas, new tools, new institutions, new knowledge,
and new ways of life arise, they bring forth new words – neologisms. This chapter begins with an
overview of research on the major waves of neologisms in the history of Chinese, followed by a
review of recent work on the conventionalization measures of neologisms and the computational
modeling of semantic change involved in neologisms, and concludes with suggestions of future
directions.
Keywords: neologisms, loan words, lexical history, Chinese
1. Introduction
The word neologism is of Greek origin, and literally means a “new word”. The Oxford
Dictionary of English (Soanes and Stevenson 2005: 1179) defines it as “a newly coined word or
expression.” The Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Gove et al. 1993: 1516) offers a
broader view of neologism as “a new word, usage, or expression” by including usage in the
definition. Neologisms widen our horizon while expanding our lexicon. David Crystal (1996: 73)
regards “the invention of new words” as “perhaps the most obvious way to go beyond the normal
resources of a language.” Neologisms include not just new words, but also new constructional
patterns, morphological patterns, and innovated parts of speech. Indeed, in the constant flux of
cultural development, social change, and through the continuous evolution of knowledge, such
innovations emerge to refer to new things, express new ideas, construct new identities, and to do
all of these in creative ways. Thus, neologisms are a necessary part of language if it is to be a
successful tool of communication.
In the history of Chinese, neologisms emerged in many waves, for different reasons at
different historical moments, and were driven by different agents to accomplish different goals.
This chapter provides a cursory and synoptic overview of the emergences of neologisms in the
history of Chinese, from premodern borrowings to contemporary innovations. As we will show,
the scope of lexical innovation varies as a function of the larger communicative purposes it
serves, the sociohistorical background in which the language and its lexicon develop, as well as
the medium by which it takes hold and gets propagated in the language community.
Linguistic research on Chinese neologisms began in the middle of the 20th century. The
first systematic study was Gao and Liu (1958), which distinguished new words based on
phonetic loans 音译词 yīnyìcí, semantic loans 意译词 yìyìcí, and loan translations 翻译词
fānyìcí. Zdenka Novotná (1967, 1967–1969, 1974) investigated the constraints on loanwords
imposed by Chinese phonology and morphology. Many other studies approached Chinese
neologisms from the broader perspective of language contact, cultural influence, and national
modernization efforts as part of the larger sociohistorical contingencies of lexical development
1
(e.g. T’sou 1975; Chao 1976; Masini 1993; Lackner, Amelung, and Kurtz 2001). Similarly,
research on loan translations of Buddhist concepts examined neologisms through a historical lens
of contact and innovation (e.g. Zhong 2006). Chinese-language dictionaries of loanwords were
published in the 1980s in both mainland China and Taiwan, such as Hànyŭ Wàiláicí Cídiăn
(《汉语外来词词典》) (Liu and Gao 1984), Wàiláicí Cídiăn (《外来词词典》) (Guoyu Ribao
1985), Hànyŭ Wàiláiyŭ Cídiăn (《汉语外来语词典》) (Cen 1990), indicating an appreciation of
the lexicographical impact of language contact. Recent publications of dictionaries of neologisms
such as Quánqiú Huáyŭ Xīncíyŭ Cídiăn (《全球华语新词语词典》) (T’sou and You 2010) and
100 Nián Hànyŭ Xīncí Xīnyŭ Dàcídiăn (《100 年汉语新词新语大辞典》) (Song 2015) pointed
to increased interest in the lexicography of neologisms from a historical perspective.
2. Neologisms in the history of Chinese
No part of language mirrors changes in society as immediately and palpably as the lexicon.
Lexical neologisms in particular serve as the linguistic barometer of such changes. The zeitgeist,
the passions and the fashions of an era, the strife and struggles of the people, the predicaments
and preoccupations of society are all lexicalized and crystallized in the new words that enter a
language when they enter the language. Through the lens of neologisms, we can see history, both
lexical and cultural.
2.1 Neologisms in pre-modern Chinese

Language contact and cultural exchange are a driving force in the creation of neologisms.
Perhaps the most well-known wave of neologisms came with the transmission of Buddhism
through translations of Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into Chinese. Beginning in the Eastern
Han dynasty (25–220 C.E.), the long and complex process of the doctrinal translation continued
into the Song dynasty (960–1279) with its culmination in the early 5th century C.E. (Pulleyblank
1983; Norman 1988; Liang 1986, 1994; Mair 1994; Chen 2000; Zhong 2006).1 This extended
wave of neologisms brought into the Chinese lexicon hundreds of novel concepts erstwhile
unknown in the language. The most famous ones include 阿彌陀佛 āmítuófó ‘Amitābha’, 菩薩
púsà ‘bodhisattva’, 方便 fāngbiàn ‘upaya’, 有情 yŏuqíng ‘sattva’, 因緣 yīnyuán ‘hetu-pratyaya’,
涅槃 nièpán ‘nirvāna’, 袈裟 jiāshā ‘kasāya’, 夜叉 yèchā ‘yaksa’, 喇叭 lăba ‘rava’, 度脫 dùtuō
‘paritrāṇa’, 灌頂 guàndǐng ‘kanjō’, 極樂 jílè ‘sukhāvatī’ and, of course, 僧 sēng ‘samgha’ and
佛 fó ‘Buddha’. Alongside the brand new coinages are Buddhist concepts rendered by way of
metaphor into existing Chinese lexemes, such as 覺悟 juéwù ‘cittotpāda’ and 尘垢 chéngòu
‘rāga-doṣa’, also known as 佛化汉词 fóhuà hàncí ‘Buddhisticized Chinese words’ (Cao 2013:
22–23). The infiltration and integration of Buddhist words into the Chinese word stock attest to
the popular appeal of Buddhism, a religion with an “egalitarian emphasis on personal quest for
enlightenment,” to use the words of Ostler (2005: 208). Thus, despite philosophical, linguistic,
sociopolitical and institutional barriers such as those discussed by Mair (1994), an unprecedented
space of spiritual expression opened up, with a fresh worldview, a new set of social values, as
well as changing social organization.
In addition to these well-known 佛典词汇 fódiăn cíhuì ‘vocabulary of the Buddhist
classics’ or 佛源词 fóyuáncí ‘words of Buddhist origin’ (Wang 2004; Cao 2013), i.e. religious
neologisms originating in the Chinese translations of the Buddhist scriptures, new words were
also found in great quantity in various vernacular Chinese manuscripts from the Library Cave at
2
Dunhuang, including but not limited to Dunhuang Bianwen and Dunhuang Yuanwen texts (Zeng
2000). Examples of this type include verbs such as 鄭重 zhèngzhòng ‘solemn’, 過往 guòwăng
‘pass by’, 消散 xiāosàn ‘dissipate’, 分解 fēnjiĕ ‘separate’, but also nouns such as 阿婆 āpó
‘mother-in-law’, and 功人 gōngrén ‘meritorious person’ (Zeng 2000: 225–232). Studies of the
translated religious texts and the vernacular materials preserved at Dunhuang have enabled
lexicographers to trace the attestations of many words to an earlier time point than indicated in
the standard dictionary Hànyŭ Dàcídiǎn《汉语大词典》(Luo 1986), casting new light on the
diachrony of neologisms in Chinese lexical history (Wang 1997; Gao 2011; Cao 2013).
In general, it is fair to say that the translation of religious expressions from Sanskrit
constitutes the core of premodern lexical innovation in Chinese, which has a lasting impact on
the Chinese lexicon and the vernacular language in general.
2.2 Knowledge transmission and neologisms in early modern and modern Chinese
Neologisms in early modern and modern Chinese represent the height of lexical innovation and
creation as a result of large-scale transmissions of Western systems of knowledge to China, a
process known as 西學東漸 xīxué dōngjiàn ‘development of Western knowledge in the East’,
which began in the early 17th century, and culminated in the early 20th century (Lackner,
Amelung, and Kurtz 2001). The systematic and explosive creation of neologisms that took place
during this time period was unprecedented. The bulk of neologisms in modern Chinese came into
being as the result of wholesale importations of new terminologies of entire fields including
mathematics, chemistry, politics, law, mechanics, among many others (Alleton 2001). In
discussing these new lexical entities, T’sou (1975) spoke of “lexical importation” and Chao
(1976) used the notion of “interlingual borrowing”. For the better part of the 19th century,
British, American, and German missionaries played a crucial role in the transmission of Western
systems of knowledge by translating Western works, producing Chinese-language magazines,
and compiling bilingual dictionaries (Lippert 2001; Shen 2001; Fan 2015). The Chinese lexicon
irrevocably changed as a result of the neologisms created in this process, which endured the
turmoil of modern Chinese history. Some familiar items are 參贊 cānzàn ‘counselor’, 車票
chēpiào ‘bus fare/train ticket’, 函數 hánshù ‘function’, 赤道 chìdào ‘equator’, 地球 dìqiú ‘the
earth’, 光學 guāngxué ‘optics’, 化學 huàxué ‘chemistry’ etc. (Fan 2015: 28–29). More
importantly, the wholesale creation and nativization of terminologies of Western scientific
disciplines in the Chinese lexicon provided the keystones of entirely new regimes of knowledge
in Chinese. 2 In the late 19th century, these new regimes of knowledge were embraced by
Chinese social reformers such as Kang You-Wei and Tan Si-Tong, who made enthusiastic
references to concepts in mechanics in their calls for social change and modernization (Adelung
2001).
The Meiji Reform in Japan in the second half the 19th century gave rise to further and
wide-ranging sinification of Western concepts by way of massive translations of Western works
into Japanese, whereby kanji was used to render the original concepts. Towards the end of the
19th century and in the early 20th century, these Sino-Japanese words were introduced into
Chinese in their written forms, pronounced as Chinese words.3 Chinese intellectuals studying and
sojourning in Japan played a pivotal role in bringing these familiar looking foreign words into
Chinese. Examples of the most well-known neologisms include 科學 kēxué ‘science’, 哲學
zhéxué ‘philosophy’, 社會 shèhuì ‘society’, 現實 xiànshí ‘reality’, 觀念 guānniàn ‘view’, 意識
yìshí ‘consciousness’, 經濟 jīngjì ‘economics’, 政治 zhèngzhì ‘politics’, and 進化 jìnhuà
3
‘evolution’ (Lippert 2001: 67–70), words so entrenched in the Chinese tongue and mind that it
can be utterly surprising for the uninitiated to learn about their foreign origin. Clearly, the Sinitic
script played an essential part in the transmission of the new concepts into Chinese by way of
Japanese. The characters provided a “culturally compatible” medium of lexical innovation, to use
the words of T’sou (2001: 46), who defines compatibility as accessibility, agreeability, and
familiarity.
The last imperial dynasty of Qing was overthrown in 1911. With it came the urgent call
for total abolishment of traditional norms and radical modernization of the nation, which
characterized the essence of the New Culture Movement. At the forefront of this movement were
cultural leaders and intellectual elites who were convinced by a social interpretation of
Darwinism and saw Western science and democracy as the solutions to China’s backwardness.
Many of the loan neologisms were quickly integrated into the vocabulary of the iconoclastic new
youth, and became lexical instruments of a nascent drive toward enlightenment.
2.3 Political neologisms in socialist China

If the turn of the 19th century experienced an explosion of neologisms created from Western
systems of knowledge, the second half of the 20th century saw an onslaught of political
neologisms inspired by Russian communism, which subsequently morphed into Chinese-style
socialism. Many neologisms represent concepts pertaining to class struggle, the most famous of
which are emergent social political categories of people: 阶级敌人 jiējí dírén ‘class enemy’, 牛
鬼蛇神 niúguǐshéshén ‘cow devil snake spirit’, 黑五类 hēiwŭlèi ‘black five categories’, 臭老九
chòulǎojiŭ ‘the stinky ninth’, 走资派 zŏuzīpài ‘capitalist roader’, 赤脚医生 chìjiăoyīshēng
‘bare-foot doctor’, 红卫兵 hóngwèibīng ‘red guard’, 造反派 zàofănpài ‘rebellion’, 工农兵学员
gōngnóngbīng xuéyuán ‘worker-peasant-soldier student,’ and political and ideological
evaluatives: 又红又专 yòuhóngyòuzhuān ‘red and specialized’, 根红苗正 gēnhóng miáozhèng
‘root red and sapling straight’, 越穷越光荣 yuèqióng yuèguāngróng ‘the poorer, the more
glorious’. There are also a medley of verbs and verbal phrases referring to political movements
or revolutionary activities 大跃进 dàyuèjìn ‘great leap’, 上山下乡 shàngshān xiàxiāng ‘up to the
mountains, down to the country’, 劳改 láogăi ‘labor modification’, 下放 xiàfàng ‘downward
dispatch’, 接受贫下中农再教育 jiēshòu pínxiàzhōngnóng zàijiàoyù ‘accept reeducation by the
poor, and lower middle peasants’, 忆苦思甜 yìkŭ sītián ‘remember bitterness and ponder over
sweetness’, 斗私批修 dòusī pīxiū ‘fight the privatist and criticize the revisionist’, 大炼钢铁
dàliàn gāngtiĕ ‘make enormous amount of steel and iron’, 揪斗 jiūdòu ‘publically denounce and
punish,’ as well as various forms of political media 样板戏 yàngbănxì ‘model theater’ , 忠字舞
zhōngzìwŭ ‘loyalty dance’, 语录歌 yŭlùgē ‘Mao’s quotation songs’, 大字报 dàzìbào ‘big
character poster’. Ji (2004) characterized the creation of such political neologisms during the
Cultural Revolution as “linguistic engineering,” the intentional linguistic construction of reality
for the purpose of manipulating mass perception and biasing public opinion in favor of an
ideological cause. Chen (1999) considered the semantics of the neologisms originating in the
Cultural Revolution and their referential domains. Dai (1996) pointed out the semantic
peculiarities of these neologisms by analyzing their referential falsehood, illogicalness,
militaristic meaning, and offensiveness.
Other studies take a presumably more innocuous perspective of morphology to describe
the political neologisms. Diao (2006) identified a number of word formation processes
underlying the political neologisms, including productive affixation using 革 ( 命 )- gémìng
4
‘revolution’, 红- hóng ‘red’, 黑- hēi ‘black’, the proliferation of numerals in compounding such
as 三突出 sāntūchū ‘three emphasize’, 三忠于 sānzhōngyú ‘three loyal’, 一看二帮 yīkàn èrbāng
‘one look two help’ 四个伟大 sìgè wĕidà ‘four greatness’ etc., and the productive use of
militarist morphemes as in 打语录仗 dǎyŭlùzhàng ‘fight the Mao quotation war’ 革命闯将
gémìng chuǎngjiàng ‘revolutionary warrior’, 文功武卫 wéngōngwŭwèi ‘intellectual attack and
military defense’ 五七战士 wŭqīzhànshì ‘May seventh soldier’ etc. Research on the lexicon and
grammar of the Cultural Revolution (Diao 2006, 2007, 2008, etc.) reconstructs for us the
linguistic violence and stridence of a brutal era. Decades since the brutality, experiences of
injurious turmoil and heinous destructions may have receded into the darkest corners of the
memories of those who suffered the devastation. Similarly, the words that documented the
turmoil and destruction may have fallen into oblivion. With the dismantling of planned economy
and the development of market economy in the last several decades, China is said to have
entered the era of postsocialism (Dirlik 1989). However, the word formation patterns that are
characteristic of the socialist vocabulary have not entirely bowed out from the Chinese lexicon.
New coinages such as 八荣八耻 bāróng bāchĭ ‘eight glories eight shames’, 一带一路 yīdàiyīlù
‘one belt one road’, 两学一做 liǎngxué yīzuò ‘two study one act’, 四个全面 sìge quánmiàn ‘four
comprehensives’, 踏石留印 tàshí liúyìn ‘stomp rock leave mark’, 抓铁有痕 zhuātiĕ yŏuhén
‘grab iron leave mark’ make their way into the public space from party leader speeches and party
newspaper editorials, with a familiar political swagger.
3. Grassroots neologisms in the Chinese Internet
The Chinese Internet became part of the global digital information network in 1994 (Tang 2010;
An 2012). Since then it has been flooded with constant deluges of neologisms. For over a decade,
annual book-length “release lists” of Internet neologisms get published, documenting and
reporting the latest coinages. A 2007 article in the China Daily called the Chinese Internet
language “a totally different language”, and raved about the borrowing of the -ing ending as the
most “ingenious” innovation, which, the article proudly announced, has put an end to the
absence of inflection in Chinese.4 The utter exoticness of the Chinese netspeak has also raised
lots of eyebrows, and inspired the very neologism 火星文 huŏxīng wén ‘Martian script’, which
refers especially to the hybridized forms that mix characters with alphabetic signs and other
visual graphemes, e.g. 期末愉快 (o^^o). The hyperbole of such gushing descriptions bespeaks
the conspicuous novelty characteristic of Internet neologisms.
3.1 The unique place of Internet neologisms in Chinese lexical history

Chinese Internet neologisms occupy a unique place in Chinese lexical history. They distinguish
themselves from the earlier lexical innovations in multiple ways. First of all, let us consider the
agent of the innovation. As the discussions in section 2 indicate, the earlier lexical innovations
were initiated by learned religious ambassadors, intellectual elites, or ideological authorities. By
contrast, Chinese Internet neologisms came into existence through the creativity of the grassroots
language users – Chinese netizens. They emerge when netizens participate in networked mass
communication and mass self-communication in the unique spatial, temporal, and technological
existence of the digital age (Castells 2009, 2012; Crystal 2011).
Second, consider the direction of transmission. Initiated by elites from above, earlier
neologisms spread in a top-down fashion through religious teaching, and by institutional means
5
such as mass education and political propaganda. By contrast, Internet neologisms as the fruit of
grassroots creativity spread horizontally in networked mass communication. Some items have
ultimately spread upwards by entering mainstream media language use, and even the calculated
vocabulary of politicians.
Third, consider the stories told and the social realities conveyed by the digital lexical
innovations. Given the top-down provenance, earlier neologisms shed light on the cultural,
ideological, and political priorities of their times, but rarely reflected the conditions of existence
of the common people, much less the states of existence of the everyday individual. By contrast,
the new words and expressions that come and go in wireless China open a window into the anger
and anxiety, the desire and despair, the hope, horror, and hysteria, and the resentment and
resistance of real people in a society that finds itself stressed by the rapacious and reckless chase
for wealth, and constricted by the tight grip of information regulation.
Finally, consider the impact of the lexical innovations on Chinese society. Previous
waves of lexical innovations, each in its own way, played a creative and transformative role in
societal change, for better or worse. Mair (1994: 719) observed that the introduction of Buddhist
concepts and doctrines provided “a means for the individual to escape from the normal societal
bonds” largely defined in Confucian terms. This, he argued, “constituted a dangerously
subversive challenge to existing structures and institutions.” The introduction of Western
scientific terminologies ushered in modernization of Chinese society by bringing about extensive
knowledge migrations within less than a hundred years. The same process had taken Europe ten
times as long to complete (Amelung, Kurtz, and Lackner 2001). The socialist linguistic
engineering served as a tool of propaganda for an ideological agenda aimed to consolidate party
power by mobilizing the mass for a destructive revolution. The Internet neologisms, by contrast,
create a discursive space for the ordinary netizens within the constraints of information control
and censorship.
Research on Chinese Internet neologisms is subsumed under 网络语言 wăngluò yŭyán
‘Internet language.’ In what follows we will give an overview of linguistic research on the form
and meaning of new words, and computer mediated communication (CMC) research that focuses
on the mediality of the new words.
3.2 Linguistic studies of Chinese Internet neologisms

Five areas of inquiry can be identified. First, scholars query the nature of Internet language as a
new linguistic and social phenomenon. Some focus on it as an unprecedented linguistic
revolution driven by the digital revolution in wireless technology (Wang and Zhong 2008).
Others consider it from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective and see Internet neologisms as
elements of a unique sociolect of the cyber community (Kuang and Jin 2008; Liu and Ma 2003;
Zhou 2003; Gu 2005; Gao 2007; Dong 2008; Zhang and Wang 2009 inter alias). Gao (2007)
explicitly argued for the social construction of identity through the use of Internet neologisms by
Chinese youth. Gao (2008) adopted the construct of apparent time model of change proposed by
Labov (1966, 1981), predicting the lasting impact of Internet neologisms on Chinese in terms of
long-term linguistic change. It is true that age or generational difference is a variable in the use
of Internet neologisms. However, an “apparent time” approach to language change works ideally
when the linguistic behavior of different generations is observed and analyzed with regard to a
well-defined linguistic feature (Labov 1966, 1981, 2006). Internet neologisms exhibit great
formal, semantic, and pragmatic variations, and do not as a whole provide a well-defined object
of variationist sociolinguistic analysis. An apparent time approach also requires that behavior
6
involving the same linguistic feature be studied for a second time across generations with a
certain time interval (Blondeau 2014: 497). In the decade since Gao’s (2007) study, many of the
neologisms have sunken into oblivion and been replaced by newer items, which indicates a
rather transient if not fortuitous tendency of Internet neologisms.
Second, many studies are concerned with the morphological processes underlying the
formation of Internet neologisms (Yu 2001a; Hui 2006; An 2008; Qiao, Xu and Shi 2011) as
well as their semiotic explanations (He 2003; Peng 2009; Zong and Li 2005; Zhang 2006; Zeng,
Zhang, Wang 2008; Wang 2008; Cao and Liu 2009). There are three most frequently noted
morphological processes:
(1) Compounding, e.g. the semi-productive use of 网- wang- in 网友 wǎngyŏu ‘netizens’,

网瘾 wǎngyǐn ‘Internet addition’, 网恋 wǎngliàn ‘Internet love affair’, 网语 wǎngyŭ
‘Internet language’, 网民 wǎngmín ‘netizens’, 网购 wǎnggòu ‘Internet shopping’, 网聊
wǎngliáo ‘Internet chat’, 网缘 wǎngyuán ‘romantic destiny in the Internet’, and -奴 -nú
‘-slave’ referring to someone under financial burden caused by the referent of the noun it
is attached to, as in 房奴 fángnú ‘house slave’, 车奴 chēnú ‘car slave’, 菜奴 càinú
‘grocery slave’, 孩奴 háinú ‘child slave’, 婚奴 hūnnú ‘marriage slave’, 节奴 jiénú
‘holiday slave’, 卡奴 kănú ‘credit card slave.’ Such disyllabic compounding involves a
suffixoid and verges on derivational word formation. On the other hand, we also see
facetious compounds that play with the aloof form of quadrisyllabic idioms, e.g. 细思极
恐 xìsījíkŏng ‘scared upon careful consideration’, 不明觉厉 bùmíngjuélì ‘impressed
without understanding’.
(2) Homophony, e.g. 叫兽 jiàoshòu ‘yelling beast’ > ‘professor’, 砖家 zhuānjiā ‘brick
professional’ > ‘expert’, 草泥马 căonímă ‘grass mud horse’ > càonĭmā ‘fuck your
mother’, 河蟹 héxiè ‘river crab’ > héxié ‘harmony’, 油菜花 yóucàihuā ‘rape blossom’ >
yŏucáihuá ‘talented’, 童鞋 tóngxié ‘child shoe’ > tóngxué ‘classmate’. Some may involve
homophony in a regional dialect, e.g. 木有 mùyŏu ‘wood have’ > méiyŏu ‘not have’, 美
眉 mĕiméi ‘pretty eyebrow’ > ‘girl’, 香菇蓝瘦 xiānggūlánshòu ‘fragrant mushroom blue
skinny’ > ‘want to cry feel sad’, 小盆友 xiăopényŏu ‘small bowl friend’ > ‘little friend’,
长姿势 zhăngzīshì ‘grown pose’ > ‘gain knowledge’. While all of these items are
homophonically creative, some are meant to be sarcastic and derisory, others are
knowingly antagonistic and subversive, still others are innocuously jocular. Comparative
morphological analysis of neologisms used in Mainland China versus those used in
Taiwan and Hong Kong can be seen in Liu (2002) and Yu (2011).
(3) Loanwords, including homographic loans from Japanese, e.g. 封杀 fēngshā ‘force out,
block’, 逆袭 nìxí ‘strike back’, 御宅族 yùzháizú ‘otaku’, 宅男 zháinán ‘otaku boy’, 宅女
zháinǚ ‘otaku girl’, and 萌 méng ‘cute’ (Qiao, Xu, and Shi 2011); phonetic loans from
English, e.g. 血拼 xuĕpīn ‘shopping’, 拉铁 lātiĕ ‘latte’ (itself a loan from Italian) with a
modern and fashionable flair, and playful phrasal units such as 狗带 gŏudài ‘go die’ and
图样图森破 túyàngtúsēnpò ‘too young too simple’; phonetic loans from Korean, e.g. 斯
密达 sīmìdá ‘sumnida’, used flippantly at the end of an utterance about a topic related to
7
Korea, and 欧巴 ōubā ‘oppa’, a term used by female k-pop fans to sweetly address their
boyfriends or older brothers, or to refer to their favorite Korean male pop stars. The
embrace of phonetic loans by the Chinese millennials suggests a youthful indifference to
the traditional preference of lexical nativization in the form of semantic loans.
Third, the seeming unruliness of Internet neologisms stirs concerns about the decline and
corruption of the language. Such concerns along with an inclination toward prescriptivism
among some scholars have prompted studies on Internet language regulation and standardization
(Chen 2004; Chen 2011; Deng 2009; Jiang and Zhuang 2004; Li and Zhang 2006; Pan 2008).
Others are calmer and more sympathetic toward the defiant youthfulness, the fearless
expressiveness and creativity of neologisms, and are optimistic about the self-regulatory capacity
of Internet language (Liu 2002; Mu and Xie 2008; Yue 2006).
Fourth, Internet neologisms have garnered attention from cognitive linguistics. Ji (2012)
investigates Chinese Internet language in terms of cognitive economy, imagery and image
schema, categorization, and conceptual transfer including metaphor and metonymy. Conceptual
metaphor in particular has become a favorite topic in recent research (Bao 2011; Lu and Ju 2011;
Zhi, Wang and Jia 2011).
Fifth, the lexical semantics and lexicography of Internet neologisms are of central interest
to lexicographers (Li 2002; Li 2009), and dictionaries of Internet neologisms have been compiled
such as Yu’s (2001b) Zhōngguó Wăngluò Yŭyán Cídiăn 《中国网络语言辞典》Zhou and
Xiong’s (2008) Wăngluò Jiāojì Yòngyŭ Cídiăn《网络交际用语词典》. The biggest challenge
for the lexicography of Internet neologisms lies in the faddishness of new words in the Web.
Many neologisms fail to catch on after the initial craze. Some fall out of use almost as soon as
they make it into a dictionary at which point the latest lexical fad has already passed. Others
linger for a longer time until the next creative wave brings new coinages. The Internet fosters
crazes for linguistic fads by means of its speed and reach, which also accelerates the inventory
turnover of neologisms: in the age of WeChat and LINE, no one wants to be called out for using
an outdated new word.5
3.3 CMC studies of Chinese Internet neologisms

Communication scholars approach the Chinese Internet language with a focus on mechanisms
behind the propagation of neologisms (He 2005; Cao and Liu 2008; Cao 2012; Xie and Chen
2007; Xie and He 2007; Wu 2009). This line of research is particularly interested in the viral
quality of Internet neologisms and sees an explanation for it in what has come to be known as
memetics. Memetics is a theory of the transmission of cultural information, adapted from the
Darwinian theory of biological evolution. It posits an analogy between the replication or rather
self-replication of genetic information in the transfer of genes in biology and the copying of
cultural information from one mind to another through the transfer of its basic units in cultural
transmission – the memes (Dawkins 1976; Hull 1982, 2000; Dennett 1991; Blackmore 2001,
2007). Definitions of memes are many and rather messy (see Kronfeldner 2014 for a review).
The ideational concept of memes as units of cultural transmission originated in The Selfish Gene
(Dawkins 1976), where Dawkins proposed that memes “propagate themselves in the meme pool
by leaping from brain to brain via imitation (p. 192).” Blackmore (2001: 225) further furbished
the analogy by claiming that the meme is “an evolutionary replicator, defined as information
copied from person-to-person by imitation” whereby the human brain serves as a “selective
imitation device.”
8
On the memetic model, neologisms are selfish memes, competing with other neologisms
for the sole purpose of reproducing themselves in new hosts. Attractive as this account may seem,
its appeal is also its vulnerability. Kronfeldner (2014) called into question the validity of the
analogy between the memetics of culture and the genetics of biology in terms of origination,
ontology, and the agent of change: (1) unlike the selection of genes based on blind variation, the
selection of ideas in cultural evolution rests on guided variation; (2) while genes have an
ontologically identifiable material substrate (bits of DNA) at the molecular level and are
therefore replicators in a narrow sense, memes do not have a definite material substrate
analogous to the DNA; (3) genes replicate selfishly and their fitness explains their successful
diffusion, but memes do not have a fitness independent of the “causal power and interests of
individuals” who introduce them into the cultural pool. In other words, when it comes to cultural
evolution, humans are in charge, not memes.
While memetics has been widely discredited and even condemned as a pseudoscience
(Atran 2001; Baron 2008; Walter 2007), its theoretical validity has hardly been questioned in the
Chinese scholarly community. Rather, the psychological reality of memes is taken for granted,
and the application of memetics in research on Chinese Internet neologisms remains fashionable.
The CNKI database holds over 1800 journal articles published in Chinese between 2008 and
2016 on a memetic approach to language and communication. In addition to the Darwinian aura
surrounding it, memetics offers an easy answer to the baffling question as to why Internet
neologisms travel and spread so infectiously. By treating language as a self-sufficient “evolving
organism” (Blackmore 2008) and by granting neologisms an independent existence as memes, it
constructs a narrative of selection, replication, dissemination, one which is oblivious to the
meaning and function of language, the psychology and stance of the language users, or the social
context of language use, all of which are complicated matters about which there is no rough-and-
ready explanations. As Kantorovich (2014: 372) poignantly noted, “when we adopt a memetic
stance, we will not be bothered by paradoxes.” Presumably for this reason, gross
oversimplification is easily mistaken for elegant simplicity.
Ironically, the avoidance of paradox by way of oversimplification has proved paradoxical
and self-defeating in memetic studies of Chinese Internet neologisms. The inevitable paradox
lies in the incompatibility of the autonomy of memes and the agency of language users. As can
be seen in both theoretical discussions (Chen and He 2006; Zhang 2008; Wu and Wang 2010; Gu
2011; Cao 2012, Li and He 2014, inter alias) and case studies (Zhou 2013; Zeng and Wei 2016),
the memetic approach focuses on the “fitness” of new symbols and words as the explanatory
mechanism of their rapid diffusion, and relegates language users to a passive role of 宿主 sùzhŭ
‘host.’ At the same time, however, the studies on this approach cannot help but attribute the
“fitness” of linguistic memes to the preferences, desires, and attitudes of the human hosts while
denying them agency and causal power in the selection and propagation of their favorite
neologisms. For example, Li and He (2014) granted linguistic memes subjectivity. Yet they
defined that subjectivity as the pragmatic attitudes of the human hosts, whose role must be
rejected and jettisoned within the framework of memetics the central tenet of which is the
selfishness and autonomy of memes. Clearly, despite their best intention to uphold the theory,
studies of linguistic memes cannot circumvent the very evidence that undermines the theory. In
fact, to analyze the diffusion of neologisms in terms of social and pragmatic factors such as
socio-pragmatic function, social context, and user preference, as the above mentioned studies
9
invariably do, is to invalidate the very idea of an autonomous meme. Like any linguistic change,
the diffusion of neologisms is explainable when both language-internal and language-external
factors are considered. Such considerations obviate the need for notions as dubious and spurious
as the autonomous meme. In fact, developmental trends of neologisms can be investigated with
empirically reliable methods. Computational lexicography is one such endeavor to which we
now turn.
4. Computational models of neologisms
As mentioned in previous sections, the web environment has spawned a wealth of neologisms at
a rapid pace. As a by-product of continuous language change, neologisms can be studied on
empirical basis, especially when considering the pace of adaptation and distribution of lexical
innovations and inventions inundated by the emergence of voluminous textual data on the web.
This section introduces two lines of computational treatments of neologisms concerned with
conventionalization measures and semantic change modeling.
4.1 Conventionalization measures

The notion of conventionalization refers to the ‘dynamic socio-pragmatic process by means of
which a linguistic innovation becomes established in the language and the speech community’
(Kerremans 2014). Specifically, fast-growing neologisms bring challenges and chances to
Lexicography and Applied linguistics in two aspects. First, it has posed a challenge for
lexicographical decisions regarding when these newly coined words should be considered as
institutionalized and deserve a place in the normative dictionary. It is also noted that the majority
of new words in fact fail to become established in language. Algeo (1993) who studied the
desuetude of words pointed out that even those words that do make it into dictionaries often fall
out of usage. For example, 58% of the new words collected in the Britannica Book of the Year
between 1944 and 1976 were not rewarded with a dictionary entry. This leads to another
challenging lexicographical decision: when more words are included and no words are excluded,
contemporary dictionaries turn out to be diachronic ones, which confuses language users and
learners. Similar ‘full-of-desuetude’ situation can be found in Mandarin dictionaries.6
Two major intertwined issues for computational lexicography are concerned here: (1) Do
we have the chance to develop a conventionalization/stabilization measure of neologisms that
indicate whether they are likely to remain in usage, and therefore should be included in a
dictionary? (2) Apart from the frequency factors as heavily relied upon by previous research,
what is the role of linguistic knowledge in this exploratory and modeling process? To handle
these issues, we will have to explore the ways of modeling the lexicalization process based on
the understanding of its underlying linguistic, cognitive and social factors, and based on that, to
develop a proper measure of ‘conventionalization.’
Corpus-based computational lexicology and lexicography has made progress as an aid for
lexicographers in extracting novel words and senses as well as automatically parsing their
morphological patterns in recent years. However, authenticating the vocabulary still remains one
of the lexicographer’s tedious tasks in practice. Recent works have further delved into the
general picture and the driven factors involved in the life stage of words. Anchored on structural,
socio-pragmatic, and cognitive perspectives, Schmid (2008) proposed three corresponding stages:
creation, consolidation, and establishing. Based on a 1.2 billion-word corpus from UK
newspapers (1989–2011), Renouf (2013) proposed the Life cycle of words such as birth, settling
10
down, obsolescence, death, and re-birth. Kerremans (2014) posited four stages of what is called
conventionalization. Quantitative investigations have also brought about significant progresses in
the understanding of words’ life-stage statistics (originated, evolved, die out), assuming that
word frequency takes the lead in explaining the success story of words, life stages and the pre-
diction force of whether a word may survive after being coined, and reveals a strong relation
between changes in word dissemination and changes in frequency (e.g., Altmann et al. 2011,
2013). In the context of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, Liu et al. (2013) compiled and
preprocessed a Monitoring Corpus in 2005-2017 that dynamically crawls the discussion boards
from PTT, which is one of the largest web forums in Taiwan. 7 The time-series analysis of
frequency data thus gained also show that frequency can be used as a determinant in lexical
diffusion and changes as shown in Figure 1.
However, as noted by Cook (2010), since neologisms are expected to be rather infrequent
due to the recency of their coinage, methods for lexical establishment that rely solely on
statistical distributional information are not well-suited for learning the linguistic properties of
neologisms, particularly those which have very low in frequency. Take 小鬼 xiăoguǐ and 高铁
gāotiĕ ‘high speed rail’ in Figure 1 (right part) for example. The former one shows peaks with
high frequency during its development, which implies that it has a higher stability of being a
word. The latter one has a significant peak at the beginning, and then starts decreasing gradually.
In fact, 高铁 gāotiĕ was a popular issue since late 2005 after the construction was formally
announced by the government, but the topic has fallen out of focus year after year since then.
This suggests that public issues can impact the occurrence and destiny of a neologism, and that
the difficulty of detecting a potential neologism is not only due to its low frequency, but also due
to extra-linguistic factors. These large, short-term fluctuations indeed add an important new
dimension to the study of the long-term dynamics of language, as any novel expression must
survive in the short term to survive in the long term (Altmann et al. 2011). But short-term
frequency data per se do not reveal the difference between diffusion and stabilization.
Figure 1. Neologism monitoring Corpus and time-series analysis
There have been lexicographical studies focusing on conditions or factors and their interactions
that could maximally explain lexical establishment, i.e., in determining whether a nonce word
will disappear or survive. By observing words appeared in English new-word dictionary in 1990
and the extent of their inclusion in general dictionary several years later, Boulanger (2002)
proposed eight factors, including frequency, popular referent, non-specialized register,
particular notional fields, variety of genre, cultural prominence, synonymous competition, and
11
taboo association. Metcalf (2004) proposed FUDGE factors, which is an acronym of five
conditions: (1) Frequency of the words, (2) Unobtrusiveness: a successful word should not be
exotic or too cleverly coined, (3) Diversity of users and situations, (4) Generation of other forms
and meanings, namely the productivity of the word, (5) Endurance of the concept, related to the
concept's reference to a historical event, and formulated as (𝐹, 𝑈, 𝐷, 𝐺, 𝐸) , where each
conditions are measured on a 0-2 scale. Based on the Google Book Ngram corpus,8 Wang and
Hsieh (2016) conducted an exploratory analysis, demonstrating that linguistic knowledge at
various levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc.) can be
exploited to infer the survival chance of neologisms in the language system even with the short-
term frequency data. Multiple linear regression and logistic model with backward variable
selection and AIC criterion were used (with 82% variations explained with R2 = 0.80). In
general, semantic and pragmatic dimensions significantly explain stabilization (words before
1950); and syntactic ('co-text') dimensions significantly explain diffusion (words coined around
1997).
4.2. Semantic change modeling

The production of neologisms encompasses a wide variety of linguistic processes both in
synchronic and diachronic settings. From the linguistic perspectives, the diachronic and gradual
process by which novel lexemes and lexical units become a permanent addition to the lexicon is
labeled as establishment (Schmid 2011), which has been studied in terms of lexicalization,
sometimes equated with semantic change in general.
Recent advances in machine learning techniques have entered the field of neologism
studies. In particular, a vector representation model of words trained in the neural networks
called word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) has demonstrated a huge success in different
natural language processing tasks. Basically, word embeddings are low-dimensional vector
representations of words based on the distributional contexts in which words appear. Trained on
a large diachronic corpus, it can be used to capture semantic changes of words. Kulkarni et al.
(2015) recently proposed a neural word embeddings model for tracking and detecting meaning
shift, such as the sense of ‘gay’ over the last century based on the online Google Book Ngram
corpus. This model highlights the distributional aspects rather than the traditional takes on
frequency aspects. Hamilton et al. (2016) proposed a diachronic embeddings method against
corpora over time, and have revealed two linguistic laws of semantic change: (i) the law of
conformity — frequent words change more slowly; and (ii) the law of innovation — independent
of frequency, polysemous words have a faster rate of semantic change. In this regard, Chinese
with its well-established writing system and yet still existed for thousands of years actually
provides a unique window to observe the long-term semantic change. Modeled on the
Embedding Projector (TensorFlow project of Google), a system has been recently created by
LOPE lab at National Taiwan University. The system implements a hanzi-embeddings-based
Distributional Model trained on diachronic Buddhist textual data from post-Han dynasty up to
the most recent corpus, which can be used in tracing character/word neighbors and temporal
character/word analogies in Chinese.9 Take the character 業 yè ‘business’ for instance, Figure 2
demonstrates a significant semantic change from Tang dynasty (left) to the modern times (right),
where we can see that most of related terms have shifted from karma-related sense to the walks
of life sense.
12
Figure 2. Semantic shift of 業 yè from Tang Dynasty to Modern Times
5. Conclusion
If language is a mirror of society, then neologisms, perhaps more than any other linguistic
elements, instantly and immediately reflect changes in society and its zeitgeist. In this chapter,
we reviewed the major waves of neologisms in the history of Chinese. This overview gave us
insight into the Chinese lexical history as part of the Chinese cultural history. Each of the waves
of neologisms arose in response to the calls of its time, be it the existential need of faith and
religion, the transmission and reception of knowledge, or the manipulative fanaticism of political
indoctrination. Some coinages have survived and become part of the lexical stock, others have
ebbed away after a fleeting peak in use.
We also reviewed the current research on grassroots lexical innovations that have been
mushrooming in the fertile soil of the digital revolution that brought about global
interconnectivity and rapid mass transmission of information. The excitement and amazement
about the semiotic creativity and versatility of the Internet neologisms are palpable in the
literature. At the same time, there is concern about the potential corruptive force of the unruly
neologisms threatening the integrity of the language. Most of all, there is a desire to find an easy
answer to the rapid diffusion of the new words in the cyberspace. We have shown that empirical
methods can be used to measure and model the development of neologisms without having to
rely on just-so-stories about Neo-Darwinian memes.
Finally, research on the Chinese Internet neologisms is ongoing, and much more need to
be done. In his reflection on research on the Chinese Internet, Yang (2014: 135) warned of the
“focus on technology at the expense of meaning and people.” Understanding language is central
to understanding meaning and people, and the Internet language must be studied in relation to the
larger sociocultural and political context of meaning making in contemporary China. As Jing-
Schmidt (2014, 2016) argued, it is necessary to investigate the social structure, the social
psychological motivations, and the social indexicality of the Internet language for a better
understanding of the larger sociohistorical moment in which Chinese Internet neologisms emerge,
spread, and create a discursive space. Currently, there is a vibrant development in sociological,
13
cultural and critical approaches to discourse in the Chinese Internet, which examines the cultural
and political implications of Internet communication (Yang 2009, 2011, 2014; Meng 2011; Xiao
2011; Wu 2012; Yang, Jiang, Kumar and Combe 2015). Future linguistic research of Chinese
Internet language has much to gain by drawing insights from such developments across
disciplinary boundaries.
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1
The translation and transmission of Buddhism has had far-reaching and multi-level impacts on
Chinese. See Chapter 2 of this volume on the different stages of the transmission of Buddhism
into China and its impact on Chinese grammar, and Chapter 4 of this volume for discussions on
translations of Buddhist texts in the larger context of linguistic and cultural contacts along the
Silk Road. See Ostler (2005) for a discussion of the influence of Chinese transliteration of
Sanskrit on Chinese phonetics.
2
See Shen (2001) for discussions of the contributions of missionaries to the creation of
terminological systems at different stages of development and in different geographical locations
of China.
3
Because of the common written forms, these words are also referred to as 汉字同形词
‘homographic words’ (Fan 2015: 31).
4
A popular token of the –ing usage is: 期待 ing, qīdài-ing ‘looking forward to.’ The China Daily
article can be accessed at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2007-02/08/content_804036.htm
5
The desuetude of words is certainly not specific to the Internet environment. In his
lexicographic study of English new words, Algeo (1993:281) observed, “[s]uccessful coinages
are the exception; unsuccessful ones the rule, because the human impulse to creative playfulness
produces more words than a society can sustain.” The Internet no doubt makes this common
phenomenon more visible.
6
Interested readers can refer to MOE Chinese Dictionary (an open sourced project for the 台湾
教育部国语辞典) at https://www.moedict.tw
7
http://lopen.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw/pttcorp
8
http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html
9
Embeddings projector for Chinese semantic modeling: http://140.112.147.121:8288/
22
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2. Neologisms in the history of Chinese

2.1 Neologisms in pre-modern Chinese

2.3 Political neologisms in socialist China

3. Grassroots neologisms in the Chinese Internet

3.1 The unique place of Internet neologisms in Chinese lexical history

3.2 Linguistic studies of Chinese Internet neologisms

(1) Compounding, e.g. the semi-productive use of 网- wang- in 网友 wǎngyŏu ‘netizens’,

3.3 CMC studies of Chinese Internet neologisms

4. Computational models of neologisms

4.1 Conventionalization measures

Figure 1. Neologism monitoring Corpus and time-series analysis

4.2. Semantic change modeling

Figure 2. Semantic shift of 業 yè from Tang Dynasty to Modern Times

discourse on Chinese Internet. Global Media and Communication, 7(1): 33–51.

Zhengzhou: Henan Renmin Chubanshe.

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