U.S. presidents have invented many of the political—and everyday—words we take for granted today.

New words are coined all the time, but the processes for creating them have been used for centuries.

New words are not always treated with respect, whether or not we respect their inventors.

From George Washington’s first presidential “administration” to Donald Trump’s promises to cut taxes “bigly,” U.S. presidents have played a big role in shaping the direction of the country, including the words we use to talk about everything from national politics to everyday objects and actions.

Words From Washington—The Person and the Place

George Washington was not just the first U.S. president. He was also the first to use the term “administration” to apply to a president’s term in office, and an early user of the more pedestrian word “indoors.”

An even more prolific inventor of new words was Thomas Jefferson; he’s credited with more than a hundred new terms, including “electioneering,” “indecipherable,” “odometer,” and “belittle.”

Other Presidents also left an enduring mark: John Adams gave us “caucus”; from John Quincy Adams we get “gag rule”; and from Zachary Taylor we have “First Lady.”

Even the term “founding father” itself was coined by a president, though it was Warren G. Harding, in the early 1920s, not one of the founding fathers. Harding, a prolific talker, also popularized the word “bloviate” and introduced us to “normalcy.”

Colorful Words and Memorable Sayings

One of the more colorful inventors of new vocabulary was Theodore Roosevelt. He’s responsible for spreading words and phrases like “muckraker,” “pack rat,” “loose cannon,” “bully pulpit,” and “mollycoddle.” He also coined “lunatic fringe,” a word that refers to members of a political or social group with extreme, some would say crazy, views.

Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt also gave us sayings that stick with us, like his famous “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Harry S. Truman gave us “the buck stops here,” likely derived from poker (where a buck knife was passed to the next player to deal). He also popularized another phrase, this time from a more domestic sphere: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

How Are Words Invented?

Quite fittingly, one of Thomas Jefferson’s new words was “neologize,” which describes the process of creating new words, or “neologisms.” A number of presidents have been neologists—or coiners of new words—over the years.

Sometimes new words are invented entirely, like the word at the end of President Trump’s infamous tweet of 2017: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

Some interpreted “covfefe” as a typo, a mangled version of “coverage.” Trump himself jokingly hinted at a more mysterious meaning when he tweeted: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’???” To this day, even linguists, experts in dissecting language meaning, still can’t determine the origins of this puzzling presidential neologism!

But usually when we make new words, we don’t do it out of whole cloth. Instead, we combine existing words or parts of words in new ways. Jefferson made “belittle” by adding the prefix “be,” meaning “to make” or “to cause,” to the word “little.”

Two hundred years later, George W. Bush used the same process, adding prefixes and suffixes to familiar words in unfamiliar ways, to come up with words like “misunderestimate” and “embetterment”—linguistic innovations whose contribution to the “embetterment” of the English language is still up for debate.

Words We Love to Hate

Another way we get new words is to change up their part of speech, for example, changing nouns into verbs or verbs into nouns. This is how we got “neologize,” which comes from the noun “neologism,” and also the word “finalize,” a verb coined by Dwight D. Eisenhower out of the adjective “final.”

This process is still at work today and is responsible for a lot of words people love to hate, including terms like “actioning,” “dialoging,” “onboarding,” and “adulting.”

It’s very difficult to trace a word’s origins or to definitively pinpoint who used it first. Or, to borrow another of Teddy Roosevelt’s phrases, pinning down word origins is like “nailing jelly to a wall.”

Likely, some of the new words attributed to U.S. presidents weren’t actually invented by them but instead simply gained new prominence through being used by prominent people.

Negative Press for Presidential Neologisms

But this doesn’t mean that people always embrace presidential lexical innovations. Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose linguistic legacy includes the impactful term “military-industrial complex,” was derided for the seemingly innocuous “finalize”; FDR was criticized for using the now-common word “iffy.” President Lincoln was deemed too casual for using the word “sugar-coated” in a message to Congress, and even the great neologizer Jefferson took a lot of heat for “belittle.”

Today, we’re still uncomfortable with presidential neologisms. “Covfefe” caused a kerfuffle; Trump himself claimed he didn’t say “bigly” but rather “big league”; and it’s impossible to misunderestimate how impressed people were with George W. Bush’s wordsmithing abilities—still put forth today as an example of how not to speak presidentially.

Enduring Resistance to Language Change

Such sentiments demonstrate that, as fond as people are of making up new words—and of spreading them when their leaders promote them—there’s just something about language change that leaves us squeamish. Or rather, to use a word coined by John Adams way back at the turn of the 19th century, listening to U.S. presidents coin new words always seems to give us just a touch of “qualminess.”

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