A few days ago
Monkey of the Dark

Can anyone please give me some words created from literary pieces?

I’m talking about words that are first used in stories and then are slowly accepted as a real-world term…nya.

Examples would be:

Frankenstein (monstrous creation)

Lolita (precociously seductive girl)

Jekyll and Hyde (one having a two-sided personality)

Romeo (male lover)

Top 3 Answers
A few days ago
Gwillim

Favorite Answer

Some of these are best known as adjectives.

Babbitt (provincial big-talker, like Sinclair Lewis’s character)

Falstaffian (like Shakespeare’s character Sir John Falstaff, fat and boastful)

Faustian (ambitious, willing to make a deal with the devil)

Gargantuan (gigantic, like Rabelais’s character)

Holmesian (keenly perceptive and deductive, like Sherlock H.)

Micawber (a person out of his depth who lives on hope, like the Dickens character)

Milquetoast (an exaggeratedly timid man, like Caspar Milquetoast in the H.T. Webster cartoons)

Pangloss (a foolish optimistic, like the character in Voltaire’s Candide)

Pecksniffian (hypocritically self-righteous, like the Dickens character)

Pickwickian (behaving like Dickens’s Samuel Pickwick)

Quixotic (nobly but foolishly idealistic, like Don Quixote)

Rodomontade (excessive boasting, like that of Rodomonte in the Renaissance classic Orlando Furioso)

I don’t know if you had these in mind, but some words were first used in literature, not as people’s names but as ordinary words. For example, in “Jabberwocky”, in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”, the words “chortle[d]”, “galumph[ing]”, and “frabjous” were introduced; some people now use them in ordinary conversation. Karel Capek’s play “R.U.R.” introduced the word “robot”. Robert A. Heinlein made up “grok” for “Stranger in a Strange Land”. William Gibson’s book “Neuromancer” contains the new word “cyberspace”. J.K. Rowling’s coinage, “muggle”, is widely recognized. There are lots more.

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A few days ago
LuLu
Casanova

Rebel without a Cause (one who’s dark and brooding)

Jiggy (first used by Will Smith and is now listed in Webster’s)

Sybil (person who’s schizo)

going ‘postal’

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A few days ago
bingobum
Huckleberry (mischievous friend)
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