OF COURSE IT PAYS TO increase your word power. But how?

Most of the time, it is done painlessly and unconsciously. We encounter “bling”, “chav”, “numpty”, or “blog” and gradually build a picture of what these words must mean.

If we build up the wrong picture, sooner or later someone will correct us – an encounter of the second kind. Eventually, we will be able to check our understanding by looking them up in a dictionary – a close encounter of the third kind.

If the word has been around a while, it will be in the dictionary. So the most obvious way to increase your word power is to have a dictionary available to check a meaning when you see or hear something unfamiliar. It has to be an up-to-date dictionary, of course – one published in the past five years or so.

If you cannot remember where you last saw your dictionary, but think you recall seeing the one that Aunt Mavis left you in her will somewhere in the utility room last year, something is not quite right.

But don’t restrict your attention to dictionaries. New words come into the language every day, filling gaps and meeting needs that weren’t there before. You hear them on television and see them in the press. Who invents these new words? You and me. In five main ways.

- We borrow words from foreign languages. This has always been a big feature of English, which has borrowed words from more than 350 languages in its 1,500-year history. Eighty per cent of English vocabulary is not Anglo-Saxon in origin. So, if sumo wrestling is your interest, acquire the terminology. You could become a linguistic yokozuna. Alternatively, do another Su Doku.

- We make new compounds: “goog-lewhack”, “pooper-scooper”, “snail mail”. Some of these patterns are quite productive, such as the way that “xxxx-challenged” has come into the language as part of political correctness. We can now be environmentally, visually, vertically, even linguistically-challenged. You may not like these, but they increase your word power.

- We blend bits of words to make new ones. Thus we get “Chunnel”, “Oxbridge”, “brunch”. New blends turn up all the time. I believe there were some sexsational rockumen-taries about Glastonbury this year. Fantabulous.

- We convert words from one part of speech to another. The technique goes right back to Middle English. “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle,” the Duke of York says to Bol-ingbroke in Shakespeare’s Richard II, effectively turning two nouns into verbs. And it’s an important technique today. “I wanna play with my scooter,” the child says. “I’ll scooter you if you don't get off to bed right now,” the parent says.

New conversions can upset some people: they object to usages such as “to office at home” or “to firewall a computer”. But it doesn’t take long for such conversions to bed down, and people forget there was a fuss. Do you remember the rows over whether we should be allowed to say “to fax” and “to e-mail”? I doubt it.

- We add affixes. We can hugely increase the number of words at our disposal by prefixing an un: uncool, unsorry, unyoung. We can acquire more by suffixing a -y: arty-crafty, I’m feeling all Olympicy. And we can do both at once: untouristy, unChristmas-sy, ungimmicky.

Do these coinages make you feel anxious? Be assured, they are all (except, so far, for Olympicy) in the Oxford English Dictionary. And if that doesn’t calm you, remember “unshout”, “uncurse”, “unsex” and “vasty”, “plumpy”, “steepy”.

As with so much linguistic invention, Shakespeare did it first.

PS BTW, don’t forget new abbreviations.

David Crystal’s most recent book is The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (OUP)

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