Dr. Seuss has a bunch of nonce coinages out there that never went anywhere (nerd is the most famous) and indeed that was, as they say, the point.

I find it very frustrating that he gets credit for coining their homonyms, identically-spelled words which have entirely different meanings and origins.

The following words were not coined by Dr. Seuss:

Blog
No. Seuss coined blogg, but it was some sort of creature. Blog comes from weblog via the phrase "We blog" via some phonetic engineering and good old-fashioned clipping. There are countless articles and posts about this.

Crunk
The first published appearance of this term may have been in the Dr. Seuss book Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, below a drawing of a Crunk-car, but it's there as part of an ideophone, a word that uses sound symbolism to convey a sensory impression.

Though even this is probably giving Seuss too much credit. I'd wager that if you searched through old comics pre-dating this book, you'd find crunk used as an onomatopoeia for the kind of sound he had in mind.

Its modern homonym crunk, on the other hand, seems to have been coined sometime in the early-to-mid nineties, probably either as a blend word combining "crazy" and "drunk" or from the substitution of "c" for "d" in drunk. There's a claim, an Internet claim, floating around that crunk appeared on the Conan O'Brien show in the mid-nineties, though from what I understand no definition was given. This may also have been a third homonym, once again nonce.

Geek
No, this is just crazy, lazy BBC factcheckers to the contrary. I don't have an OED handy, but geek is a circus term that goes at least back to the 1800s. You're confusing it with nerd. And that's a whole other issue.

Nerd
As my dictionary notes, "the word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!" (The nerd is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.)"

However, as noted by the website The Origin of the Nerd, nerd was already appearing as a slang term in Newsweek by 1951 and it seems highly unlikely that it could jump from a funny-looking animal in a kids' book to something like square in less than a year. The actual origins of the word are unclear, though I'm partial to the (admittedly difficult to prove) joke etymology theory.

Of which more at the aforementioned website.

Zillow
If you believe the corporation's founders, this is a blend of zillions (!) and pillow. While I find this etymology profoundly awkward and lame, the mere existence of the 1974 childrens' book There's a Wocket in My Pocket! (where the zillow is a creature on a pillow) doesn't prove a connection. I could see my mind getting changed on this one with new evidence, but as Dr. Seuss knew, blend words are easy to make.

Labels: etymology