So Lexember is over for another year and it’s time to look back and sum up the toil of the past month. First of all, I want to thank ConWorkShop; their daily themes proved, this year as in so many years past, an invaluable aid to glossopoietic creativity.
The idea of Lexember is to create one new word each day in December for your conlang, or constructed language. You can create more if you like; many do, and this year I did create at least three words each day. You can create the words all for one language, or for many different languages; I tend to concentrate on Rireinutire, and this year all the words were for Rireinutire.
Now the moment has come that you have so eagerly awaited: time to liven up my interminable prose with some exciting statistics.
In Lexember 2022, I coined 185 new lexemes for Rireinutire. I also expanded the definitions of 17 extant lexemes, for a total of 202 new words. Of the 185 new lexemes, 130 were nouns, 25 adjectives, 22 verbs, 5 adverbs, 2 multi-word phrases, and 1 affix. Of the 17 expanded lexemes, 10 were nouns, 4 adjectives, 2 verbs, and 1 adverb. If we further divide the new nouns by gender, 17 were rational (+1 extant and expanded), 5 feminine, 2 masculine, and 106 inanimate (+9). And of the new verbs, 10 were intransitive (+1), and 12 transitive (+1).
My most productive day was the 25th, when I coined nine lexemes and expanded one. My least productive days were the 10th, 14th, and 23rd, when each day resulted in three new lexemes.
The Rireinutire lexicon at ConWorkShop numbered 17,451 before I started uploading my Lexember 2022 coinages on 1 December 2022, and 17,710 after I had uploaded the last one on 31 December 2022. This word count is necessarily higher than the number of unique lemma forms because there often is no one-on-one correspondence between Human English and Rireinutire words. So by that count, I coined 259 new words (glosses) for Rireinutire.
In addition to the new lexemes, I also wrote each day a sentence in Rireinutire as a kind of introduction or commentary on the theme of the day. Some of these were specifically written as a way to show off words that would have fit the theme but that I had already created previously. Some were an opportunity to use the new words in context.
And do I have a favourite among my new words? That’s kind of like asking which one is my favourite child. But I must admit there are two words I quite like:
amasosu /ˈɑmɑˌsosu/ n. IN skyscraper (from ama ‘kiss’ + sosu ‘sky’ as I pointed out on the day)
sunepope /ˈsuneˌpope/ n. IN crossword puzzle (from sune ‘word’ + pope ‘braid’)
This concludes my Lexember 2022. Let’s do it again next December!
Flowering Fields 