6 Real Words Born in Fiction

  1. The word nerd first appeared in Dr Seuss’ 1950 picture book, If I Ran the Zoo, although Seuss’ nerd was a small animal from the land of Ka-Troo.
  2. First used by Jonathan Swift in his 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, Yahoo is a brutish race of people ruled by the Houyhnhnm, a noble race of speaking horses.
  3. Lewis Carroll created the term chortle in his 1872 novel, Through the Looking Glass.The word appears in his poem ‘The Jabberwocky’ in which the old man ‘chortles in his joy’ when his son beheads the monster.
  4. Utopia is the title of Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book about a perfect society situated on an island of the same name. Using the Greek ‘topos’ for ‘place’ and the prefix ou- or u- meaning ‘no’, Utopia literally means no place.
  5. The word cyberspace first appeared in a 1982 short story by the sci-fi writer William Gibson. The word combines the terms ‘cybernetics’ and ‘space’.
  6. Catch-22 is the title and central problem of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel, in which a simultaneously dangerous and idiotic military regulation maddens the poor characters tangled up in it.

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