# From Plenipotentiary to Puddingless: Users and Uses of New Words in Early English Letters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01688/) (2019)
- [Challenges for Computational Lexical Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07668/) (2021)
- [An Unsupervised method for OCR Post-Correction and Spelling Normalisation for Finnish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03502/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Orthographic Information in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01391/) (2020)
- [Modernizing Historical Documents: a User Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00659/) (2019)
- [Morphological Disambiguation of South S'ami with FSTs and Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14062/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Lemmatization of Historical Old Literary Finnish Texts in Modern Orthography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03266/) (2021)
- [Processing M.A. Castr'en's Materials: Multilingual Typed and Handwritten Manuscripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14153/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Pok'emon and Mario Streamers' Twitch Chat with LLM-based User Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10934/) (2024)
- [Subword-Based Comparative Linguistics across 242 Languages Using Wikipedia Glottosets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18791/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study neologism use in two samples of early English correspondence, from 1640--1660 and 1760--1780. Of especial interest are the early adopters of new vocabulary, the social groups they represent, and the types and functions of their neologisms. We describe our computer-assisted approach and note the difficulties associated with massive variation in the corpus. Our findings include that while male letter-writers tend to use neologisms more frequently than women, the eighteenth century seems to have provided more opportunities for women and the lower ranks to participate in neologism use as well. In both samples, neologisms most frequently occur in letters written between close friends, which could be due to this less stable relationship triggering more creative language use. In the seventeenth-century sample, we observe the influence of the English Civil War, while the eighteenth-century sample appears to reflect the changing functions of letter-writing, as correspondence is increasingly being used as a tool for building and maintaining social relationships in addition to exchanging information.