[LINK] On the origins of the word "petaloso" (#petaloso)

[rfmcdonald]

The BBC's article "How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word" looks at how the Internet helped birth an Italian word.

A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment.

Matteo described a flower as "petaloso" ("full of petals"). The word doesn't officially exist in the Italian dictionary, but grammatically it makes sense as a combination of "petalo" ("petal") and the suffix "-oso" ("full of").

The assignment got Aurora thinking - could the eight-year-old Matteo have invented a new word? With his teacher's help, the student wrote to the Accademia della Crusca - the institution that oversees the use of the Italian language - to ask for their opinion.

To their surprise, the pair got an encouraging reply.

"The word you invented is well formed and could be used in the Italian language," one of the Crusca's top linguistic experts wrote. "It is beautiful and clear."

But, the linguist added, for a word to officially be part of the Italian language, a large number of people need to use it and understand its meaning. "If you manage to spread your word among many people who start saying 'What a petaloso flower this is!', then petaloso will have become a word in Italian."