A Word, Please: There’s no use calling a word not a word

If you do a Google search for the term “isn’t a word” and throw in the term “grammar” to sift out the silliness, you’ll get a lot of hits.

Most of them are from people saying that some word isn’t a word. Or that some other person said that some word isn’t a word. “Impactful,” “irregardless,” “snuck” and so on simply don’t qualify, people say, and anyone who uses them is making a terrible mistake.

In the broadest definition of the word “word,” these folks are all wrong. After all, a made-up word is a word. A nonsense word is a word. That’s no surprise.

What is surprising is that even when you take a stricter view of the word “word” — taking it to mean a word officially recognized by the language’s leading authorities — these folks are still usually wrong. And they arrive at their errors in one of two ways: Either they don’t know how to use a dictionary or they don’t know how to use prefixes and suffixes.

Here’s what I found when a recent search took me to an ask-the-editor feature at WritersDigest.com: “I say ‘snuck’ all the time (as in, ‘I snuck some cookies before dinner’), but my grandma is always telling me ‘snuck’ isn’t a word and I should be saying ‘sneaked.’”

Though this provided good fodder for the website, which I’m pleased to announce handled the question well, it was technically a waste of time. The answer was available much faster in a dictionary, if you know how to use it. Past-tense forms like “sneaked” and “snuck” usually don’t have their own entries but instead show up under the entry for the base form of the verb. In this case, that would be “sneak.”

Look up this verb in Merriam-Webster’s and you’ll see somewhere after the entry word the notation: “‘sneaked’ or ‘snuck,’” indicating the past tense form. Dictionaries always put the most standard form first, so we know that both of these are OK, but “sneaked” is preferred.

Another hit for “isn’t a word” brought me to the Business2Community website, where a blogger had compiled “10 grammar gaffes that make you look like a blogging blockhead.” No. 10 on the list was “impactful.” “This isn’t a word. Don’t use it. It’s a made-up buzzword for which we can thank the marketing industry.”

Lots of words are made up, including “buzzword.” But that’s not the biggest weakness in this statement. “Impactful” is a word, officially documented in Merriam-Webster’s, but only if you know where to look for it. Like many adjectives derived from nouns, it’s listed under the noun itself: impact.

But even if it weren’t listed in that dictionary, “impactful” would still be a legitimate word. Why? Because of little things in the English language called prefixes and suffixes, which you can tack onto other words, usually without a hyphen, to create your own word.

If you got a piece of news from someone who arrived in a car, you could legitimately refer to that as “carborne” news because “borne” is an official suffix in English. You could have a blockwide dilemma, an elevenfold problem or a conundrumful experience. That’s just how suffixes work. Prefixes, too, by the way.

This strategy doesn’t work as well for “irregardless.” If you put the prefix “ir” on the word “regardless,” the result would be illogical. However, because so many people before you have done just that, the word has become officially sanctioned in most dictionaries. No one said a word has to be logical to qualify as a word. And “irregardless” definitely qualifies.

Of all the hits I got searching for “not a word,” only one got it right: “Marriage isn’t a word,” one website noted. “It’s a sentence.”

JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].