Creating Words and Worlds

Many people may not know this about me, but I love to play with word roots, like Greek and Latin pre/suffices. To borrow the vulgar argot: "It's just the funnest thing." I'd always been curious about this as a game, you know, creating new words (or discovering obscure ones, as with circumversion—thought I made it up, but it totally existed) out of these components. It's a useful exercise, not just for learning and memorizing these roots but as a creative tool: a new word can evoke images, suggest a culture or a new world.

I've been making my own lists of word components, but here are a couple resources for Greek and Latin medical beginnings and endings:

• Wikipedia
• Nat'l Library of Medicine
• About.com
• English words categorized by prefix and suffix

And now, a selection of made-up words that I may do something with later.

tocometer

a tool to analyze and measure one's children (Ex.: Either my tocometrics are way off, or you're eating too much sugar, young man.)

necrophore

one who transports corpses/carcasses (Ex.: Consarn it anyway! Whar's that blasted necrofer at? This here body needs ta git throwed into Potter's Field 'fore it 'splodes in this heat!)

demolatry

adoration of the common people (Ex.: No one with that much money can claim to be a demolatrix, I assure you.)

demomancer

artimage among common folk (Ex.: The street parade abruptly escalated from mere celebration to an impressive demomantic display of raw power.)

gazophylacium

a treasury (Ex.: Fetch his lordship from the growlery... or lock him in there! There's been a disaster in the gazophylacium!)

amphigenic

capable of producing on all sides (Ex.: What she lacks in talent and vision, she more than makes up with in amphigenicity.)

scoptognosis

intelligence gained from merely looking around (Ex.: Turn off the news and try being a little more scoptognostic for five minutes.)

glucography

the art of sculpting a subject in sugar (Ex.: While ample written material testify to this popular trend, no actual artifacts of Victorian glucography have managed to survive.)

epeoversal

a capacity for turning words around (Ex.: Punch me in the face if I ever date another epeovert.)

chremalysis

why we can't have nice things (Ex.: We own a pair of curious and chremalytic cats.)

trichorrhage

hair bursting forth (Ex.: You did not have this much hair yesterday. I think you're trichorrhaging.)

oesophore (Amer. esophore)

that which carries those which carry (Ex.: A mailman's horse.)

siderocordic

iron-hearted (Ex.: Come here and kiss me, you unlikable, siderocordic coprophage.)

zymolatric

overly fond of fermentation (Ex.: After boiling 12 gallons of wort, the zymolaters each took a pot home to work their discrete magic upon it.)

ephebopenia

a paucity or dearth of teenagers (Ex.: Quick, my love, let us enjoy the ephebopenic streets until the Justin Bieber show lets out.)

pantacusis

a variant of clairaudience (Ex.: I mayn't confirm what you claim to have heard in Kuala Lumpur just now, but I think the rest of your soi disant pantacusis is nothing more than eavesdropping.)

methodypsia

a condition in which one gets thirstier with the more booze one imbibes (Ex.: self-explanatory)

pygodyte

something that enters or lives in your butt (Ex.: Much of R. Crumb's work was titanophilic, yet I own a few pygoditic specimina.)