The “Unaliving” of English

If one is on social media these days (who isn’t?), one may have run into a recent addition to the English lexicon; the Gen Z slang verb “to unalive,” synonymous with the more familiar verb “to kill.” (Merriam-Webster does have an entry for a homograph of this new verb, also spelled “unalive,” but this is a different word with a different meaning: “to be unalert.”)

New words come into the language regularly. (This is why dictionaries come in different editions.) Nonetheless, there are linguistic rules that determine what can be a new word in a language. Each word that manages to make it into the lexicon of English also has a history that explains how it caught on, and when it first came on the scene. Each word has a story.

Click