WORDS INVENTED BY AUTHORS

1. the vorpal sword from Alice in Wonderland wasn't in the dictionary until Lewis Carroll put it on  paper. Carroll is famous for his invented words.

2. Tween -- a Hobbit between ages 20 and 33. Thank Mr. Tolkien for this one, although the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't give him credit for it. 

3. Murray Gell-Mann had been thinking of calling them "kworks" until he read Finnegans Wake and named the fundamental components of the nucleon Quarks. Who knew James Joyce would influence physics, too?

4. Cyberspace first appeared in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer in 1984.                                                                          

--Stacy Conradt, The Quick 10.