Konzeptura – Create New Words!
Here’s a challenge for you: Create words that don’t exist yet! Why? Because this shows us how the human mind shapes language. What ideas will you turn into a new word? This will help us uncover the creative spark that drives the evolution of language.
Every day, people come up with new words, such as “Zollhammer” and “Frauen-Nati,” Words of the Year for 2025. We’re exploring how people create new words – neologisms – and we’d like to test your creativity!
You’ll be shown unusual, unfamiliar images: bizarre creatures, strange objects, things you’ve never seen before. Your challenge: Come up with a word that fits these weird things.
In three short games, each with its own set of images, you’ll create new words under different conditions. First, you’ll come up with a name on your own – pure imagination, with no rules except one: it can’t be an existing word.
Then the real challenge begins: You and a partner are each sitting in front of a screen, and you must describe your image with a single ivented word so that they can identify it from among several images. Will your creation be clear enough?
In the final round, you’ll see exactly the choices your partner has to choose from – so you can adjust your word to make your image more distinctive from the others.
Every word you create tells us something about how the human mind shapes language: which details you notice, which you ignore, and how you transform an idea into a completely new word. That same creative spark drives word making everywhere, from Internet slang to the languages of hunter-gatherer societies that we study in the field. Join us, create, and discover how your mind gives a name to the unknown.
