Q. Who created the word fantabulous?

A. It is usually impossible to determine who first created or used a word, and while there are sometimes exceptions, fantabulous (a blend of fantastic and fabulous) is not one of them. We can say, however, that by the late 1950s fantabulous had become pretty well established in slang in places such as college campuses.

Our oldest example dates from 1957, in an advertisement in the Science News Letter for December 7. The ad is for a microscope with an Eastman f/2.5 7-inch Aero Ektar lens. The top of the ad reads, "A Fantabulous Buy!" For the record, the microscope is $10.95, including an eight-piece dissection set. That would be a superfantabulous buy nowadays, of course.

Q. Do you have any information on the word ginormous? It's a combination of giant and enormous. I think I heard it used in a movie. Is it spreading at all?

A. Ginormous is definitely spreading. In a survey on Merriam-Webster OnLine last year, ginormous was the Number 1 favorite word not in the dictionary. Ginormous appears in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary, which gives users the opportunity to share new words or meanings that they would like to see added to the dictionary.

Entry in Merriam-Webster’s other dictionaries is based upon usage, and a word must appear in a wide range of edited prose over a number of years before it can be included. Although there has not yet been sufficient evidence to back entering ginormous, a search in the LexisNexis database shows that the word’s use is spreading.

Ginormous first appeared in edited prose in an article in the Economist in October of 1977: “The state company Egam is going to cost considerably more than the £500 billion ($565 million) earmarked by the government last June, probably a ginormous £1,700 billion (nearly $2 billion).” The next citation appeared in 1986 in Toronto’s Financial Post, and the next few citations, which appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s, came from Canadian, British, and Australian periodicals.

Ginormous spread to periodicals from Ireland, Scotland, and New Zealand before appearing in New Times Los Angeles in February 1999: “apparent motto of convention, as per ginormous banner hanging from exterior walls of LACC: Making Music Makes You Smarter.” Since then, ginormous has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, and other periodicals from around the U.S. as well as in writing from Malaysia, Zimbabwe, and other countries.

The use of ginormous is certainly spreading, and if it continues to do so, it may well be added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries.

Q. Can you explain whether troop refers to one soldier or to a group of soldiers? If troop is plural, how does troops fit in? It all seems very odd.

A. Troop is a collective noun (like group or crew). It means a collection of people, usually a military unit, and it is often used attributively like an adjective before another noun ("troop level" or "troop count" or "troop movement").

The problem comes when troops is used as a plural noun to mean “armed forces” or “soldiers.” Such use is standard when troops is functioning as a collective plural in contexts like “victorious troops” and “the island was captured by American troops.” In recent years, though, there has been an increasing tendency for the plural troops to be used in contexts like “several troops were wounded,” which implies that there is a singular sense of troop in which it means, essentially, “soldier” or “member of the armed forces.” The singular use of troop in this sense is also sometimes seen in contexts like “send in one troop too many” and “help one troop to come back uninjured.” Such usage cannot yet be considered established, however, and will not seem idiomatic to many people.

Q. I am inquiring about the meaning of the root homo. In Greek, it means “same,” but in Latin, it means “man.” I was wondering, since Greek had so much influence on Latin, how is it that the same word means two completely different things in the two languages? Or does Latin derive man from same in some way?

A. Actually, the Greek influence on Latin vocabulary is relatively late and superficial, and within the Indo-European language family, Greek and Latin are not closely related, so it is not very surprising that Greek homos and Latin homo should happen to be completely unrelated. We know from comparative Indo-European linguistics that the initial /h/ sound in Greek and Latin have quite different sources. The Greek /h/ usually goes back to an Indo-European /s/ sound; in this case homos can be compared with Sanskrit sama (“same”) and Old Norse samr, which is also the source of the English same.

The Latin initial /h/ sound has a number of sources, but /s/ is not one of them. Homo can be compared to the Old English word guma, meaning “man, human being.”