Very few words are coined in isolation. Each neologism holds a clue, however faint, of the time in which it was created. The following choice of a single word from each of the last hundred years is inevitably subjective, since hundreds of new words are being created at any one time. Nonetheless, collectively these words give a distinct picture of the shifting preoccupations of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. The dates of CHEESEBURGER or MOBILE PHONE may surprise.
