Avoid using direct translations of English words, particularly for fantasy or sci-fi conlangs. English has several words that mean roughly the same for “house” - “house,” “home,” “abode,” “domicile…”

In my conlang Brillanus, there's only one word for the concept: “domata.”

Also, avoid using overtly English constructions, unless you want to seem like an American. Languages in general are incredibly varied.

I largely based Brillanus off of Indo-European languages, but I gave it a few non-IE features:

• five words for “yes,” depending on the tense of the question and who the question is directed at,
• A strict SVO word order, which is used in English but is relatively rare cross-linguiatically,
• A particle system based off of the logical language of Lojban (where use of the particle reflects the mood of the speaker - for example, “Hi vizhas i domaton poj,” means “he is going home,” but “poj” indicates that the speaker is saying it with a certain degree of mistrust.

Ultimately, though, you can do whatever you want. It's your language in the end, and you can be as natural or as bizarre as you want. I'm working on a third language written with only 12 letters - if you want a taste of “bizarre,” try saying “Iwo'u ato qas'in sa wo'a qotomi.”

I'd also recommend the phenomenal “Language Construction Kit” by Mark Rosenfelder, or his online version at Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse - it's amazing.

Good luck and happy conlanging!

I’d say finding words, creating a lexicon, is the hardest part of conlanging - if you want to do it right.

First, you should definitely have your phonology sorted out, and a consistent spelling system. If you’re making a language with horrible spelling conventions, IPA can do the job, or a phonematic spelling system so you don’t confuse yourself all the time. But since sounds are the the basic building blocks, get them sorted out. Also think about how they can be combined to form syllables - this is known as phonotactics. Does your language have a simple syllable strucure with words looking like patabo, onika, sobabu? Or do you allow cluster monsters like stlarps, fstralng, mbrolsct? Something in between?

And then what? User-12948839077772500460 introduced me to the wonderful website ConWorkShop, which gives you loads of tools to make your conlanging life easier. This includes a heap of wordlists you can work through, including the “Conlanger’s Swadesh List”, which aims to cover the most basic terms a language needs. Swadesh lists are well-established in linguistics - very generally put, they contain the words that are cross-linguistically the least likely to be borrowed. Many of them are also very basic, which makes them more likely to be root words, that is, words that cannot be broken up into smaller pieces.

If you really want to replicate the complexity of a living language’s vocabulary, the only way is to create a protolanguage and all stages of historical development, including contact with neighbour languages, dialects influencing each other, cultural and societal developments, loads of history and a massive amount of creativity. You’d need to figure out, for every single word, how old it is, where it came from, which sound changes it was affected by and what it was originally composed from (and most words of a language will be derived in some way, even if you can’t tell any more by looking at the current ones).

This is so fiendishly complicated and unrewarding that you’ll lose interest and become disheartened by the task pretty quickly. So don’t do it. I was planning to, but gave up.

A far better strategy is: find a list of basic words, like the ones I recommended above, and just create random words. Stick your sounds together according to your phonotactic rules until you have body parts, most common verbs (do, be, say, take, bring, come, go, run, fall, swim, yell, die, live, eat, drink, sleep, just to name a few), other common nouns. This will set you up nicely.

Then think about how languages expand their vocabulary. Often, derivation is involved - sticking an extra syllable onto a word to change its meaning slightly, making a new word with a connection to the old one. If you have a word bolu that means “go”, get yourself the suffixes -n, -po, -gu, -lo that mean “in, out, around, together” and make the words bolun, bolupo, bolugu, bolulo “enter, exit, pass, convene”. Then you could have a prefix that makes nouns, li, to arrive at libolun, libolupo, libolugu, libolulo “access, escape, tangent, convention”.

There is no limit to how creative you can get with deriving strategies; look around on the internet for how languages do it. Finnish, for example, has verb suffixes that can make a verb express an acion that happens once and suddenly, or repeatedly; most languages have suffixes that make a noun from a verb, arriving at “thing that does [verb]”, “person that does [verb]” - and many more.

The other powerful wordbuilding strategy is composition - you just bash words together. If dunu is “house” and ipi is “cat”, you can get dunuipi “house cat” as well as ipidunu “cat house, cat basket”. Open your mind and get creative with what the new compositions could mean. Maybe your speakers see cats as untameable, chaotic pests and ipidunu thus means “mess, chaos”? Many words you will create will just have a meaning that is the sum of its parts, but others can lead to delightful metaphors and abstractions. Body parts are a very good source too - just think of English “vehicle body” or “digital”, which comes from the Latin word for “finger”.

Just make words, and when you notice that you’re creating duplicates or a word that you already have could be better expressed by a compound or derivate, change it! Or, even better, say “the old word is just used in dialect X/is only used in formal language/is a loanword and belongs to the slang of city X/is obscene”. Languages have so many words that come from so many sources that these things happen all the time.

Just start, get your language going, and use the Conworkshop - it’s amazing, if a little overwhelming at first. Your goal shouldn’t be to have a functioning 50,000 word beast of a conlang tomorrow, but to have fun along the way, right?

I’ll try. I’m going to go with just one way although there are several.

First, write down about twenty random words that sound like the language you want to create. Definitions follow later.

You now have some kind of base of letters and sounds. Create your alphabet and diphthongs (letters that make a different sound when put together such as o + u making the ow sound in ouch or cow.)

Now give those words you wrote down some simple every day words, a few verbs and nouns and maybe an adjective or two.

Now string those words into a simple sentence. See if it sounds right to you or looks pleasing. If not, refine and try again.

Most conlangers seem to use agglutinative (prefixes and suffixes) word building which helps your create vocabulary quickly. Esperanto and Klingon do this.

Malsanulejo is Esperanto for Hospital. Let’s break it down:

Mal - opposite

san - health

ul - person

ej - place

o - noun.

A place for sick people is the literal translation. Affixes that give “opposite” and “gender” expand your vocabulary greatly.

Continue to create root words and build your affixes and start to write sentences with them. This will flesh them out. Now is also a good time to start creating a dictionary so that you can sort both in your native language and your constructed language. Remember to give definitions.

Lastly, Esperanto was meant to remove ambiguity and Klingon for aesthetic purposes. Klingon actually has homonyms and words that sound slightly similar but have completely different meanings. Alphistian uses no affixes whatsoever and is meant to sound kind of German / Danish. Sindaran uses affixes and I think also letter changes within the word for different meanings.

It’s up to you how you want to make it. It’s an art and there is no wrong way. Note that it can take months to create something but don’t let that deter you. You never truly finish, only finish for now as more words and phrases come to mind. You might even create proverbs that mean something to the native speakers but to the rest of us sound weird translated such as, “Only the master of the craft can spread cheese on a pickle.”

I’ve worked on mine while watching TV, driving to and from places (jot notes when I got to the destination), and find myself revising quite a few times a word or two here and there. Sometimes I’d think of a new rule such as all question words “what, who, why, etc.” must come after the initial verb. It adds color and gives it a foreign feel.

Again, there is no right way, only the way that you like. Have fun.

As I am developing engineered languages, I tend to look for words that fit a certain pattern, like CV(n) or CVF,
where C is a consonant, V is a vowel, and F is one of a few final consonants (like n, s, l, r).

I usually compare different widely spoken languages like English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Malay, Russian… I have found that Arabic words often shows sounds that are not easy to incorporate into this pattern, but the other languages usually contribute to my basic vocabulary,

I also love to work with a really small basic vocabulary, and then develop more complex concepts using basic roots and a strong derivational morphology. This tends to make words longer, but more easy to memorize. Some great ideas about this I found in Rick Morneau’s great monograph about Lexical Semantics.

On my website you can find several lists with basic vocabularies in sizes from 60 to 1600 words. (Building a basic vocabulary)

First things first, figure out your phonology. What phones (sounds) do you want in your conlang? Which phones are/aren’t allowed to occur in groups? How do certain phones change in specific contexts? For example, the English “th” sound can be voiced, as in “these”, or voiceless, as in “fourth”; whichever way you pronounce “th” may sound odd to a native speaker, but the words will mean the same thing. The “s” and “z” sounds, on the other hand, can change the meaning of the word. Compare the words “race” and “raise”, for instance.

You’ll also need to come up with rules governing how syllables are formed. In English, any phoneme (sound specific to a certain language) can be at the beginning of a syllable. However, if you were to try to place three consonant phonemes at the beginning of a syllable, it could comply be “str”, “spl”, or “spr”. Because of these kinds of rules, we know that “Pferd” (German for ‘horse’) is not English, because it violates the rules of how syllables are formed (an English word can’t begin with “pf”). Once you’ve got the phonology down, your language will already have a distinct “texture” to it. You’ll now be able to tell whether a word is legal to use in your conlang, or if it violates one or more of the rules governing how sounds interact.

Next, you’ll need to figure out your grammar. This is far too deep of a topic for me to get into here, but I’ll post a couple of links at the bottom to help out. This step should also include brainstorming a list of derivational affixes (if your language uses them), which will greatly enhance your vocabulary-building process.

Once your grammar is hammered out, you’ll want to figure out the orthography (writing system) for your conlang. There’s too much to cover here, so I’ll include a few helpful links below for you to do more research on this subject as well. Basically, this is where you’ll create the alphabet for your language. I would recommend NEVER coming up with the writing system before the grammar, because different types of writing systems may be ideal for different types of languages. If you have a language that relies heavily on vowels to tell the difference between noun declensions or verb conjugations, it may not be wise to have a writing system that doesn’t mark vowels.

Now comes the most tedious (in my opinion) part of conlanging—generating a lexicon. This is when you’ll come up with the basic root words of your language, which can then be changed with noun declensions (“cat” vs. “cats”), verb conjugations (“I go” vs. “he goes”; “we went” vs. “we will go”), verb aspects (“I have gone” vs. “I am going”), derivational affixes (“bake” vs. “bakery”), compounding words (“soapbox”, for example”), and so on. Think conceptually, not in your native language. To demonstrate, what does the word “root” mean in English? What different concepts does that carry with it, and how will those be expressed differently in your conlang? Will you have one word that means ‘the part of a plant that is underground’, and a different word for ‘that which provides nutrients’?

Finally, TRANSLATE! Pick stories, quotes, idioms, songs, etc. that you like to give you a wide variety of terms and sentence constructs. This process is where the rubber meets the road. If there are any flaws in your grammar, or any limitations in your lexicon, this is where you’ll find and correct them. You’ll be coming up with new words, refining definitions, and polishing the grammar rules of your conlang.

Here are the links I promised for further research.

Artifexian (Artifexian) is a YouTuber whom I would highly recommend; his channel is focused on worldbuilding, and is a great resource for writing a sci-fi or fantasy story.

Zompist (The Language Construction Kit) is a website created by Mark Rosenfelder, one of the most well-known conlangers. I would also suggest checking out his book The Conlanger’s Lexicon for help generating a vocabulary for your language.

This site (Wikibooks, open books for an open world) is a step-by-step walkthrough of different subjects in conlanging, varying from “beginner” to “advanced”.

Finally, Omniglot (the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages) is a database of writing systems—real and fictional—from all around the world. This is an excellent place to study up on different orthographies, and find inspiration for your own, should you choose to create a new one.

Okay, I may have a simplicistic method myself, but I'll try to outline the way I would.

So.

I'm assuming this conlang is a priori, so there's no language you're going to draw words from. For a posteriori languages, Oliver's answer already covered it pretty well.

Let's start from the simplest case: your conlang is atemporal. No story, no evolution, just funnybubbly words you're gonna use to whisper secret messages.

Before, you can actually do this, you'll better have at least outlined phonology (not necessary allophony), phonotactics (so you don't end up with words like fdsmdfr) and morphology (trust me, you don't want to have to introduce a thousand allomorphies becaus you suddenly realize your inflected words violate your phonotactics).

In that case, your first safest bet is getting a Swadesh list.

Assuming the language is for humans, those are mostly concepts that are intrisical to human experience, and thus you will have words. Even the classical 100 words one will do it.

Beware that, depending on how your morphology works, these need not be separate words. For example, you may want demonstrative, or interrogative, or personal pronouns to be inflections rather than words of themselves. (For example, I got a conlang where "this" is conveyed through an infix into the root rather than a prefix or adjective).

Now, if this language is instead not meant for humans, let's say for Neovulcanians, you'll want to scratch off from the list any word you know they won't use, and this requires you have your conworld at least drafted, so you can replace them with words they will need. For example, a planet that has no fish, but pterodaptyls, will probably need a word for pterodaptyl than for fish. So, exchange.

Okay, you know what words to work on.

Since you don't want to get bored coming up for hours with stat-made rootwords, you're probably better off using a generator. For example this one. That way, you'll just have a series of syllables you can pair with meanings however you want. Feel free to scratch off any word you don't like: you're not unlikely to get homophones or roots that would become phonotactics monsters as soon as they take a suffix on. Stop a second at any word to evaluate it.

Now you'll be saying, heck yeah, those are basic words, whadabbout the rest?

Stay with me.

Now you need to come up with a series of words to cover all the possible concepts. Yeah easier said than done.

There's a fair chance you will forget some words. In the end, we barely use but a portion of the vocabulary of our native languages when we talk.

So, you'd be better off focusing on basic words only and add new ones as you use the conlang.

So, okay, you made 100, let's say we wanna make 900 more.

To easen it up, use a generator (whether the one I linked or another one) and get 900 words. Then paste them to a Word document, or if you're patient enough, into a notebook, where you'll be able to use any script you want (it's your hands writing, not a limited keyboard).

Now, to assign pair them up with meanings, you don't need again to come up with invented concepts. You could, but it's risky and you also may fail to make this thousand of words a decent basic vocabulary, that should scope over at least 80% rootwords or words you'll use.

If you wanna make sure they cover enough, use a wordlist. This is one but you could find even better collections, as this is somewhat biased to the English-speaking environment.

Take those words one by one. An at any of them, stop for a moment to make some considerations.

• Do you want the word to correspond 1:1 to the English (or whatever) equivalent?
• Especially if your conlang is made for a conworld, think of how the concept would fit into the world.
• Or do you want to expand or restrict the meaning? You'll want to do this with a reasonable amount of words so that your vocabulary looks distinct and not a revisitation of an existing vocabulary. If you want to get some fresh ideas, look at some bilingual dictionary and read how your target word has different translations, to help you see better what different concepts that lexeme covers. For example, you may want to have two different words for "table", to differentiate between small and big tables. Or maybe you'll want to have a single word for "sun" and "light". Or you'll want the word "name" to only refer to people's names.
• Whatever, you can get creative here, but remember you're aiming for a basic vocabulary. So, don't distance yourself too much in twisting the concept. You can create culturospecific terms later.
• Keep in mind how your morphology works: if you have extensive derivation, you may not need to create too many base rootwords.

Usually, this is enough to lay down the basis of the vocabulary. To perfect it, the best idea is to actively use it and for, actual sentences. That way, you'll get a lot of new ideas about how to change the semantic fields of a word, or how to use the words in different context, or how to combine the words together. (Does your language say the wind blows? Or does it run? Wind? Slip?)

If you have a language in separate historical stages, then you've got something else to think about, though.

After working out the phonological evolution of the conlang, evolve the words (either manually, or if you trust them enough, a sound change applier you can find online easily).

What now?

• Look out for any homophones forming. Decide if the new merged word keeps both meanings, or if you wanna tweak a similar word to get it to mean pretty much the same thing as ine of the previous words.
• Scratch off some words periodically. Over an arc of time, some words are gonna get archaic by sheer languageforce. Choose 30–50 for each 3 centuries or so, preferably not very common ones.
• Form new words. Either by derivation, or compounding, and add them to your dictionary. It's not a bad idea to replace archaic words, but you can also consider introducing a new conceptual word altogether. You can also do this for entire phrases. These can either shift their meaning rapidly altogether, or keep the original shade even as they change. Try to imagine any conceptual shift.
• Are any new words grammaticalized? Try to work out your lexicon evolution in tandem with the grammar. Especially words that are used frequently and get very short are likely to be cliticized and eventually fused onto rootwords.
• Shift some meanings. If you decide to make a word archaic, you can think of a similar word to make the same job; that, or you can just twist the meaning just because. For example, a word meaning "illuminated" can easily be transferred to mean "good".

But the most important thing is to keep some kind of contextual consistencies. Language is evolution is just… messy, and so is vocabulary. You can make flaws in your language, or hyperadvantages. Stick in a bit of creativity, but if you wanna be realistic, document all the changes you make to the vocabulary.

You'll avoid ending up with a word you have no idea how to use. Trust me.

I apologize in advance. This is a long answer, but I wanted to make sure I explained everything in sufficient detail.

Honestly, this step of conlanging has always been the most difficult for me. It’s a tedious task that sometimes feels like a chore I have to force myself to do to get the final product. 90% of the time that I give up on a conlang, it’s while I’m trying to develop a functional lexicon. That said, there are a few different ways to go about it.

First, there’s the automatic generation method. Dozens of resources are available online or for download which can create a list of words, either at random or based on predetermined phonological rules. This is by far the most efficient way to go about creating a new lexicon, and perfect if you don’t want to devote too much time to your language, or just need a handful of words for a story or something, but there are a few downsides.

1. Obviously, wordlists do not equal grammar. You may have a bunch of words, but you will still need to determine morphology, syntax, inflections, etc. in order to have a functional language, otherwise you'll just end up with a copy of (insert native language here)’s grammar.
2. This is an extremely impersonal approach. Many (if not most) of the words generated may not be to your liking. What’s more, you’ll be starting from scratch if you intend to learn the language yourself, rather than already having some level of familiarity with the lexicon.

That said, there are a few resources I can recommend for this tactic.

• LangMaker is a free software available for download (I’m afraid I don’t have a URL link, but you should be able to find it on a search engine). I do enjoy the complexity of the software, which allows for a detailed list of rules for generating words once you get used to the daunting interface. However, it hasn’t been updated in years, so the program may not work well—or at all—with any software post-Windows Vista.
• Awkwords Word Generator is another resource. This one is online-only, but a very simple interface that anyone can use for free. You can generate thousands of words at a time, all of which can be copied and pasted at your discretion. Downside here is that, because of its simplicity, there’s a limit to how realistic you can make the language sound.
• My personal go-to is VulgarLang. This is another online resource, which can be used by anyone in the free version, or purchased in the full version for (I think) around $15. It’s very user friendly, sporting an easy-to-understand interface for people new to conlanging or with little to no linguistic background, while also offering “advanced options” for people who want to add another level of complexity to their conlangs. It also can generate a dictionary entry for each word, available for PDF download, which has up to 200 words in the free version, or 2,000 in the full version (it’s updated every few months, so some of these numbers may not be accurate anymore).

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the fully-hands-on lexicon development. This is the approach where you would painstakingly compile a list of terms that you want your conlang to include. This may be a few dozen, or a few thousand. There are plenty of online resources for this approach as well, if you’re looking to build a list of terms for your lexicon.

• The Fiat Lingua Conlanger’s Thesaurus is a PDF-available download. It is basically an inventory of commonly-occurring lexical terms found in languages. The Thesaurus also maps out connections between concepts, objects, and principles, such as the relationships between in an hour, at noon, on Monday, in February, etc. I believe the full PDF is around 30 pages, but I may be wrong.
• The Universal Language Dictionary is a project (also available for free online) which seeks to find common concepts across natural languages. What makes this resource distinct is its focus on providing a translation of each word in multiple languages, such as English, Spanish, German, Japanese, and even a couple I’m not familiar with. The current version of ULD is broken up into 40 chapters based on subject or part of speech.
• Again, my personal favorite, is Mark Rosenfelder’s The Conglanger’s Lexicon. It was written by an experienced conlanger, the same man who also wrote the Language Construction Kit (which I would recommend looking into as well, if you haven’t already). The Lexicon is similar to the ULD in how the chapters are divided, as well as offering multiple translations and word origins for many entries in the book. It also bears resemblance to the Thesaurus in that it explains relationships between concepts, and what distinctions lie between them. Rosenfelder wrote the Lexicon with conglangers focused on sci-fi and fantasy languages in mind, and the terms and their history that he presents is suited for such endeavors as well, should the reader be so inclined. This is the most comprehensive source I’ve seen, and I would highly recommend it.

Now, for the advantages and disadvantages of this method:

1. As I said, this is a painfully long process. As a hobby, this approach may take years to complete, depending on the detail, vocabulary, and motivation you have in regards to your conlang. My current conlang has been over a year in the making, primarily using this method.
2. While drawn out, you will have a far better understanding of your language at the end of this process. You can create words according to how you think they ought to sound, and you may remember some of your lexicon by the time you’ve finished developing the majority of it.

For my own part, I primarily used Rosenfelder’s Lexicon to compile a word list, referencing the ULD for prepositions and conjunctions in addition to that. My word list came up to a total of about 1,500 terms, with a rather extensive (but simple and easy-to-learn) morphology for conciseness. I am currently in the process of creating the translations of each term. Most are based on Latin or Greek cognates, both because I find the languages appealing and because I am creating this language for a few English-speaking relatives to be able to learn with ease. About 85% of the vocabulary is drawn from Latin or Greek, but the remaining 15% I am generating according to my conlang’s phonology using VulgarLang. I simply input the sound rules, click “generate”, and pick out the words I like from the list as needed.

As I said, this process has taken me about a year and a half to date, and I’m probably about 40% finished creating the translations for my word list. After that, I’ll be polishing off the grammar and working my way through some sample texts I have compiled to ensure that the language is functional and intelligible.

I’m more than happy to discuss any conlang-related subject in greater detail if you have questions, or just want to bounce ideas around. Just leave me a comment, or send me a private message via Quora. Hope this helps!

UPDATE: Last week I discovered a new resource called PolyGlot Language Toolkit. This is—beyond a shadow of a doubt—the absolute best vocabulary management system that I have ever seen for a conlanger! It’s available on GitHub from a user called Draque Thompson. He seems to have a thorough understanding of the language development process and has numerous features to benefit the conlanger, such as in-program support for custom fonts, etymological roots, and auto-filled declensions/conjugations based on your grammar, just to list a few. The only real downside to this software is that it requires a little knowledge of RegEx. However, I would point you to regexone.com for a quick tutorial (and if you don’t understand the content, each lesson has a “lab” field afterward where you can play around with it to figure it out).

Sure. It's called English. People make up words in English all the time. You can google it. (See what I did there? I guess you could bing it, but nobody does.) The meaning of the new word is often clear in context: if somebody proudly posts a picture of their face describing their eyebrows as "on fleek" you don't really need to go to Urban Dictionary to take a pretty good guess about what it means.

The word may or may not spread. If it does, somebody is likely to make an entry in the Urban Dictionary, a collaborative project of new words. Other people publish whole books of their neologisms:

Sniglets (Snig'lit : Any Word That Doesn't Appear in the Dictionary, But Should)

The Meaning of Liff

Others simply enjoy combing other dictionaries for rare words, like Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words. These words are usually obscure for a reason, though occasionally one will gain currency.

English is hardly unique in this respect. The requirement of a national dictionary like the French and Spanish have is actually unusual, and frankly both of those are fighting a losing battle. People make up new words all the time, and practically all dictionary makers think of themselves as documenting the process rather than being arbiters of what is "really" a word.

It depends on how natlang-ish you want your conlang to sound.

Toki Pona has only 123 words. You can use this list Toki Pona Dictionary and build your conlang on it. However, the describing approach isn’t always convincing: saying something like on-your-book-sleeping-animal is no practical idea of how to say cat.

I have made several attempts of listing the most basic concepts and although I haven’t yet come up with some ultimate list; from my experience, I’d say you need nearly 1000 words.

Be aware that derivations are very important. Obscure derivations are mostly bad for a conlang, but some straightforward derivations could reduce a ton of words, for example house.GROUP = hamlet or view.ORGANORTOOL= eye. Here again, you must set your balance between effective and expressive. For example in German, the word for mountain Gebirge is just a group noun of Berg - hill, but you could like me decide to have a distinct word.

Wikipedia’s basic word list could help you but don’t forget that it is made for English. When it comes to derivations, look for inspiration through the languages you know.

This Wikipedia:List of 1000 basic words - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia could help you.

EDIT! As the link to the self-made word list I previously provided doesn’t work (not surprised honestly had no idea how it should work), I updated the answer with more useful stuff. Hope it helps :)

Conlanging is a creative art. Unless your name is Marc Okrand or David J. Peterson, it doesn’t pay much at all or make you famous, but it is one.

So your question is like “What are some good paintings to look at before I start my own painting?” or “What are some good books to read before I write a book?” or “What are some good music pieces to listen to before I compose my own music?”

For all of those, real artists, writers, and composers will likely tell you the question is kind of ludicrous!

As with these creative arts, it’s

• the more you are exposed to what came before, the better
• the more diverse your sources, the better, because other people would have studied each of your sources, and if you have only a few or all from the same category, you won’t sound original. But if there are enough different sources, few others will have that combination, and so you will sound original
• being exposed to a lot of sources may make you change what exactly you want to accomplish
• start doing it, assume you will stink on your first attempts, keep working, and see what happens

Good luck!

One of the best ways to increase a conlang vocabulary is to actually use the language, write in it, think in it, speak in it when talking to yourself.

A great method I would recommend is to translate a text that you enjoy well, along the way making up the words you need to complete the translation, making sure to follow the rules of phonology, syllable structure and word formation in your language; find ways to make words for related things look similar when you want to indicate shared origins; using your derivational morphology to create words in a part of speech from words you have already established in or or more others; create compounds of existing terms; use terms that are metaphors or euphemisms; or simply coin an entirely new word if that feels the right thing to do.

Translation also allows you to practice your grammar as well as figure out when you need to add grammatical constructions you have yet to define, whether they are syntactical or morphological, and you get to practice your writing and speaking, too, so it is an activity that is rewarding in a multitude of ways.

When I was 8 years old I was reading Danielle Steele books from front to back. Of course at that age my vocabulary was very limited. My mother was not interested in hands on parenting but I really wanted to know what was being said. So I would sit on the floor with a book and all the dictionaries (no computers or internet during this time just an entire collection of dictionaries approximately one book per letter lol) and I would reference an unknown word to the dictionary as I read. I would then find ways to use the new words in everyday speech. I learned very quick and it stuck. I quickly outgrew my sister in language (she is 8 years older than me). The dictionary gave me the knowledge. Using it in my speech gave me the understanding…… To learn is to gain knowledge and then apply to gain understanding.

I use dictionaries every day when I read English.

I just did a vocabulary test just so that I could quote accurate numbers: the result was “Your performance on this test ranks higher than 92% of all native English speakers who have taken this test without regard to age.”

The test claimed I know 27,600 “word families” (the term refers to how a word like “text” also gives rise to “texts”, “textual”, and “texting”), native speakers usually know at least 20,000, and the test is not really designed for proficient or native speakers (it’s less accurate for a score above 14,000).

And I still need dictionaries. Mind you, today I’m using them to see exactly what the difference is between “counterflow” and “contraflow” in traffic management, which is hardly a distinction most people ever need to worry about…

I think building on the Swadesh list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list can’t hurt, as well as the other lists mentioned in the two links. They cover some of the absolute basic vocabulary, stuff that isn’t easily borrowed.

I’m struggling with exactly the same question at the moment, trying to lay down more than just a phonology of Proto-Mido. Creating vocabulary is arguably the most difficult part of conlanging if you want to do it in a historically consistent way, because every word has its history and you need to not only come up with words, but also from what they are composed and when they entered the language - the latter is especially important if you build historical stages of your conlang.

When in doubt whether a certain word you’re creating should be primitive or composed from other parts, it might also help to look up etymologies for it in many different languages, if available.

I haven’t devoted too much time to this question yet, but I’ll have to do it soon. Thanks for asking =)

There are several methods. Before you begin, define your conlang’s phonology (its sound inventory) and its phonotactics (guidelines on what combination of sounds can go together).

One method is just to think of the words yourself. David J. Peterson, the most popular conlanger today, uses this as his method. Alternatively, you can get software for generating words which can be programmed for your language.

In real world languages, the lexicon reflects how words came in at different times. For example, in English, words ending in “-tion” or “-ify” come through French and Latin imports and are not found in the language’s core vocabulary.

Weirdly enough you could just use excel, too easy?

You will find that online dictionaries such as Cambrifdge allow you to register and log on, then you can use them to save words you have just learned.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/

Is your language a posteriori, which means based on existing languages, or a priori, which means made up from scratch? I’m going to guess not the former, as you wouldn’t need to ask how to create words, you’d be creating them based on whatever it is you’re copying from.

So you want to create an a priori language. Do you want it to be naturalistically irregular, like many artlangs, especially ficlangs? In which case you’ll have to think about how to vary inflections to make some irregular, or how to derive words from others using affixes or other methods and then make some not follow the general rules, etc. Even if you don’t want artificial irregularity, does the language compound or agglutinate? Again, you’ll have to think about how to combine morphemes realistically and usably.

You’ll also have to think about phonological patterns. Examples are consonant clusters, syllable structures, phonotactics. Do you want any allophony - pretty much essential again in naturalistic languages, not necessary in auxlangs or engelangs.

Having decided what sound combinations you can have in morphs, how you might combine morphemes in words, and how much you want regularity or irregularity in morphology, you have enough to make up morphemes from all the phoneme combinations your language will allow. You can do that randomly, imaginatively, one-by-one, patiently, micromanagingly. Although that is laborious, it is also satisfying when you do it well, and you can finesse the result.

However there are also tools to automate the process. Mark Rosenfelder’s Gen script is one of the best known and most popular. He’s even factored in phonemic frequency variation so you don’t have all consonants and vowels turning up as often as each other. You could worse than buy his The Conlanger's Lexipedia as well of course. (BTW I’m not him, not associated with him and wouldn’t profit from your purchase! And I haven’t actually read it.) There are alternatives, such as William Annis’ Lexifer, Awkwords (that’s the latest of several versions I think), Vulgar, Syllable Generator, GenWord, Randlang, Wordo Word Generator, Logopoeist, Conlang Word Maker.

And check out r/conlangs - Resources - 5. Lexicon Building, Frathwiki - software tools - word generators, RPG Language Generator and ConWorkShop.

All words (or at least root words) were made up on the spot at some point, in all languages, that's how language comes to be. There are plenty of times were someone can just makes something up and we can understand what they mean through context. I only speak English but I imagine it's mostly the same in other languages.

Example-say we’re talking about a party I went too last night where there was alcohol and you know I drink and I say ‘oh I got so smoozeled last night’ could assume through context I got drunk. Now for some reason you like the word and start using it and people around you start using it and people post it online and it becomes a mostly accepted word for getting drunk-the word was made up on the spot.

The conlang with the largest lexicon is my own, Kankonian, which has over 100,000 words in its dictionary.

You can read about Kankonian at

although be warned, the dictionary is not up yet, as I still haven’t finished creating it.

Kankonian is the national language of Kankonia, a planet in the solar system Venska in the Lehola Galaxy, with one-world government. It is inhabited by humans who, although they are genetically capable of interbreeding with Terran humans, are millennia ahead of us, so they have bigger foreheads as a proportion of their head size than we do.

For your reference, here is a list of conlangs with over 10,000 words; that’s way more than Simlish has:

For every conlang there is one basic rule :
- Make a full lexicon of all words in this format (alphabetically) : conlang > natlang translation
This way, you'll avoid homophones; and do it in a digital format, so that you can search it thoroughly, independently of its length.

For the shape of the words, that dépends on whether your conlang is a posteriori or a priori.
A posteriori means that you'll base yourself on existing languages. Of course, the Net is a trove of dictionaries. But maybe you'll have to tweak the words so that they conform to the shape of your conlang (maybe an auxlang). So, before the lexicon itself, invent the grammar and the phonetics and phonotactics. You can define a percentage of source languages.
As an example, my main auxlang, Sambahsa, is based on simplified PIE but admits loanwords from the major linguistic areans (for example Arabo-Persian)

If you aim at an priori conlang, you may even generate words at random, you just have to create a table of all possible phonetic shapes and then you just have to throw the dice. If your language is set in a pre-existing universe (for example, a fantasy setting), there may be some already existing names : these can give you good informations about the phonetics of the dominant language there.

Which words (which meanings) shall you need ? Yes, on the Net, you can find some lists of basic words (including the short "Swadesh" list, used by some linguists). However - especially if your conlang comes from an alternative universe - your conlang may assess meanings differently than, say, English. The speakers of that conlang shall have more specialized vocabulary for things important to them, even concepts that cannot be rendered with a single word of our European languages. Perhaps you already know which notions are important to them or, if you don't have a clue but if your universe is based on some literary work, just translate into your conlang parts of this work : the most necessary words shall appear more frequently.

The first step is to state your goal. Inventing yet another “Better than Esperanto/Lojban” would probably achieve little other than distracting a few potential esperantists/lojbanists. It’s probably better to look for a niche:

• Secret language for the Illuminati
• Lingua Franca for the Nicobar Islands
• Simplified English/Mandarin/Esperanto(?) for orphanages for mentality disabled children (or children with speech limitations)
• Easy-to-decipher digital code for interstellar broadcast.

But if you want to create a better-then-Esperanto language, here are a few ideas:

• Phonetic restrictions like the open-syllable structure of Bantu and Japanese, making it easy to parse phoneme sequences into morpheme sequences. Add to this a way to support parsing of morpheme sequences into words, for example the restriction that the stem must be the first morpheme and that the stem is marked by the initial consonant.
• Parallel morphology of the spoken and signed register. For example, each morpheme consists of up to six radicals which are the UL/UR/ML/MR/LL/LR strokes in a written syllable sign, the 1st/2nd/3rd consonant/vowel/semivowel/terminal when written and hand orientation/rotation/thump/index/lesser finger/ring finger when signed. This would make it easy to construct other registers (drumbed, flagged, whistled, nautic flags, hand touches for communication with multidisabled people) and it encourages hearing people to learn sign language. It always makes the written language phonetic while at the same time easy to learn for deaf children.

At least that’s the way I learned English. As a schoolboy, I used to love reading novels by English writers (Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Herriot, Gerald Durrell etc).

One day, I decided I need to read them in English! I obtained a big English - Finnish dictionary. Using it, I looked up all the new words in the novel and wrote down the translations in the page margins(*). Initially, there were many markings per page, but pretty soon, I needed the dictionary less and less.

I highly recommend this method! It is tedious; you need strong motivation. But it works!

(*) You can’t do that with library books. Get a copy of your own! Money is no issue here … paperbacks are cheap and you don’t need hundreds of books (dozens is enough).

Well, what do you mean by “actual language”?

Of course they are constructed so people don't learn them as native languages, but as long as you can communicate in it it probably is an actual language?

I mean if you look at Esperanto, Volapük, Lojban, they are real languages I would say? There are communities around them, they were created for the purpose of communication, yeah they are actual languages.

Then there are conlangs created for auxiliary communication between certain people groups like for example Interslavic. Me as a a native czech speaker I can very well understand interslavic although I don't speak another slavic language, but all slavic speakers should be able to understand the language.

Then there are artistic conlangs. Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki are artistic languages used for media. You can use them to communicate, but it's not it's purpose.

You hage minimalist languages like Toki Pona, which are really easy to learn so then really easy to use too.

And then you have experimental languages.

So what is a language really depends on you. But I'd say that as long as communication is possible, it is an “actual” language.

Short Answer: Yes, common enough that it is happening.

Long Answer:

If by “new words”, you mean words with meanings that do not exist in English (or their other native language(s)), then I would say it is only as common as the desire to do so is common.

Some people think of doing this and follow through.

Some people think of doing this and don't follow through.

Some people think (or hear) of doing this and don't care to do it themselves.

Some people never think of doing this at all.

My own conlang does have words, and will have many more to come, that do not have direct translations in English and/or other languages.

If you're thinking of doing it, I would encourage trying it out. There are a lot of concepts that could be better explained, described, or understood if only they had a word and conceptualization attached to them.

lexicographer!

It is said that lexicographers never become good gardeners - because they're always looking up "roots" but never planting them!

What really amuses me is the Gen-Z lingo. It seems to originate in social media,music and other cultural events. But for an outsider like me it’s hard to make sense of...

Here’s an example : I can't believe I'm so cheugy that I didn't know what 'snatched' meant until my Gen Z fam explained it to me - it hits different when you realize you're not as cool as you thought you were, no cap.

How about; almost impossible?

How did Samuel Johnson do the first English dictionary?

How did the Oxford team do with their dictionary?

You have to separate words, most likely alphabetically and account for their meaning, their history, and origin among other things.

You have to know what words are beginning to be less used, which words are trendy that are going to solidify in the language. In a language that's lasted as long as English and is agglutinative you have to account for loan words.

We have AI's now, capable of extraordinary things.

With computers and AI's all you have to do is ‘prompt’ them.

We should all be geniuses? Right. No problem.

Define what you mean by “need”.

This book effectively communicates some pretty advanced scientific topic using only the 1000 most common English words.

So with 1000 words you can make yourself understood by pretty much any normally educated person.

In terms of comprehension of course you will encounter a lot of terms you do not understand in everyday life, but you will still know enough to figure out the general context of what is being said and be able to infer a rough meaning to a lot of those unfamiliar words to function in most day to day life activities. Though the number of jobs you’d be qualified to do to earn a living would be limited, and socially you’re going to come across as something of an idiot.

But then again, so do plenty of people with huge vocabularies, so as long as your pride can take it….

Basically, one can also create an auxiliary language as a hobby or even for fiction, but let's not delve into that. You are referring to the two main subgenres of constructed languages, usually called "artistic languages" and "auxiliary languages".

Artistic languages are primarily meant to serve as a means of expression. They reflect the personal preferences and taste of their authors. They can be used for various purposes: sometimes they illustrate a fictional culture, for example in a book, movie or game, but they can be used by a limited group of people as well, for example as the language of a micronation or simply as the secret language of a group of friends. They may also be used by nobody but the author himself, for example for a diary. Or they are not used for anything at all, and simply exist for nothing else but their own sake.

Auxiliary languages, on the other hand, are meant to be used for real communication by an awful lot of people. Therefore, they are not primarily conditioned by personal taste, but rather by what – in the opinion of their authors – would be good and convenient for the target group. Typically, though not exclusively, international auxiliary languages are intended to be used as an additional language by speakers of different languages. Most IALs (for example Esperanto, Volapük, Interlingua) are meant for global use, which usually leads to the conclusion that the language should be simple and regular, culturally neutral, easy to learn, easy to write and easy to pronounce, no matter where the user comes from. Auxiliary languages can also be targeted at a specific region (for example Guosa for West Africa, or several projects intended for the European Union) or a specific language family ("zonal languages", for example Interslavic, Interromance etc.).

So what's the difference between creating an artistic language and creating an auxiliary language? Well, creating an artistic language always involves creativity and fantasy. It contains features that their authors find interesting, cool or at least worth exploring. Artistic languages tend to either mimic natural languages by having lots of declensions, irregularities, etc., or push the limits of natural languages by having features that are uncommon or even non-existing (the latter especially in the case of alien languages). Many artistic languages come with their own script, something auxiliary languages rarely do. When creating an auxiliary language, the author has little or no freedom of expression. He is always limited to the (perceived) demands of the target audience. If an auxiliary language has any irregularities at all, it is usually because they were imported straight from the source languages. Most auxiliary languages are based on preexisting material ("a posteriori"), whereas most artistic languages were created from scratch ("a priori"). This is not a hard rule, though: there are auxiliary languages that are not based on any existing language at all, a typical example being several taxonomic languages from the 17th century. Likewise, an artistic language can be a posteriori, for example a fictional Romance language.

The border between artistic and auxiliary languages is not always clear, though. There is a subtle difference between purpose and motivation, and here's the deal: it's easy to say that your language is the Auxlang To End All Auxlangs, even if it is basically a product of your own imagination, and indeed, languages have been created in the past that were essentially artistic languages, but presented as auxiliary languages—probably as a justification for having it published at all. The opposite is possible as well: a person can simply create an auxiliary-type language for the sheer fun of it, as an intellectual exercise, without ever seriously proposing it for actual use.

At last, let me mention that there are constructed languages that are neither auxiliary nor artistic. Examples are logical and experimental languages, languages created for educational purposes, liturgical languages and reconstructed protolanguages.