“Words over time have a way of just oozing around.”

 Linguist, John McWhorter 

Many words that we use today originated in literature. Writers often invent words or phrases (Authorisms) when they cannot find a suitable existing one.

Banana Republic - The pejorative term meaning a politically unstable, undemocratic and tropical nation whose economy is largely dependent on the export of a single limited-resource product, such as a fruit or a mineral. was coined by O Henry (William Sidney Porter) in his 1904 collection of short stories entitled Cabbages and Kings.

Blurb - In 1907, Gelett Burgess, an artist and author, created the character Belinda Blurb, an alluring woman whose spot on a book cover was supposed to boost its sales. Today, we use the word “blurb” to describe the text snippets on a book jacket.

Catch-22 – This is the title of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel which takes place during World War II, and follows a bombardier named John Yossarian with the United States Air Force. The titular Catch-22 is a paradox where “an attempt to escape makes escape impossible.” The phrase became widespread after release of the movie based on the book in 1970 and describes the paradox of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Chortle – It is a word created by blending chuckle and snort and was created by Lewis Carroll. It made its first appearance in Through the Looking-Glass.

Freelance - This is a weird word to describe artists and writers who are paid for their services rather than through employment. In fact, it sounds slightly medieval — which is no coincidence, considering that it was coined by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe to describe knights (Free Lances) who offer their services in exchange for money. 

Grinch - It’s easy to imagine that green grump staring down from Mount Crumpit when you see the word “grinch.” However, Dr. Seuss was not the first writer to use the word. That was Rudyard Kipling in the poem, “The Lament of the Border Cattle Thief.”

Hard-Boiled – This term is documented as being first used by author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in 1886 as an adjective meaning “hardened.” In a speech he alluded to hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar. It is still used to mean “hardened, hard-headed, uncompromising.”

Malapropism - Mrs. Malaprop is a character in the 18th-century Irish play The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan who delights in elaborate, polysyllabic words and constantly misuses them. Her name comes from the French phrase mal à propos, which means inopportunely or inappropriately, but in English a "malapropism" is now specifically a misused word, in honor of Mrs. Malaprop.

Mentor - A mentor is an older teacher or guide who helps you through life, and no one needed a mentor more than Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey. His mentor was the original mentor; in fact, his name was Mentor, and he was a trustworthy friend to the hero.

Nerd – Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) is often credited with being the person who invented the word “nerd.” It first appeared in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo; however, it wasn’t used in the same context that it is today. Instead, in the book, a boy named Gerald McGrew is visiting a zoo, but doesn’t find them exciting enough, and if he was in charge, he would bring in better animals, leading to the lines “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo/A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!”

Pandemonium - In Paradise Lost, John Milton named the capital city of Hell Pandæmonium, but he didn’t invent the name out of thin air. He used classical roots: the Greek "pan," meaning all, and the Latin "demonium," or demons. Together they mean "the place with all the demons." Today, of course, pandemonium describes the chaos that results when all hell breaks loose.

Quark – Despite having nothing to do with particle physics, James Joyce helped contribute to the lexicon of the field. In 1963, Murray Gell-Mann was looking for a name for his theoretical elementary particle of matter that are smaller than a proton or a neutron. Gell-Mann originally came up with the word “quork,” which rhymed with pork. Months later, Gell-Mann was reading Finnegan’s Wake, because that’s what theoretical physicists apparently do for fun, when he came across the line: Three quarks for Muster Mark! Gell-Mann like the spelling of the word because the hypothetical particles came in threes. For what Joyce meant by quark, he was referring to a German cottage cheese-like food made by warming soured milk.

Robot – This word was first seen in the English translation of the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. It comes from the Czech word “Robotnik” meaning forced worker, serf, or slave.

Scaredy-Cat - Few phrases describe a nervous feeling so well as scaredy-cat, which first appeared in Dorothy Parker’s1933 short story “The Waltz.”

Serendipity - This word, meaning the faculty or instance of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident, comes not from a book but from a letter. Horace Walpole, the author of the gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, wrote to a friend in 1754 with news of the exciting new word he’d invented, drawing from a fairy tale set in Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka.

Syphilis - No one’s quite sure where the disease itself came from, but we can trace the origin of the word syphilis to Girolamo Fracastoro’s poem “Syphilis, or The French Disease.” His character, a shepherd named Syphilus, was punished with the painful disease after cursing the Sun God’s heat during the summer.

Terrific - In the 1660s, John Milton introduced this word in Paradise Lost to mean "frightening, causing terror, fitted to excite fear or dread," from Latin terrificus "causing terror or fear, frightful."  It wasn’t until 1888 that it was used to mean “excellent.”

Tween - In The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein created  the word “tween” — a combination of teen and twenty — to describe hobbits between the ages of 20 and 33. Today, we use it to describe the pre-teen years.

 Utopia - Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516 in Latin, and is a depiction of an ideal civilization. More made up the word “Utopia” for the ideal land as a play on a word from Ancient Greece: “eu-topos,” which means good place.

Whodunit - Book critic Donald Gordon created the term in the July 1930 American News of Books when he said of a new mystery novel: “Half-Mast Murder, by Milward Kennedy – A satisfactory whodunit.” It is still a popular way to describe a traditional murder mystery.

 Yahoo – This word comes from Johnathan Swift’s classic book Gulliver’s Travels. The main character, Lemuel Gulliver, is marooned on the islands of the Land of the Houyhnhnms. One of the races on the island are Yahoos, which are humanoids, but they are savage brutes and are ruled by the Houyhnhnms. The word “Yahoo” has since crept into the English language, defined as “a boorish, crass, or stupid person.”

(As for the technology company Yahoo!, The founders chose the name because Yahoo started off life as a directory of other sites that was organized in a hierarchical format and Yahoo! is an acronym  for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.”)