Words Invented by Charles Dickens

First appearing in The Pickwick Papers, 1836, ‘butterfingers’ was used to describe the clumsiness of someone who keeps dropping something. 

‘At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as “Ah, ah! — stupid — Now, butter-fingers”’.

The word ‘doormat’ used as a metaphor first appeared in Great Expectations, 1861, to describe a person who is treated poorly.  

This one wasn’t necessarily invented by Dickens but he was one of the earliest people to use it, when it appeared in A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, which likely helped its popularity. A Tale of Two Cities included the line ‘The court was all astir and a-buzz’.

First used in David Copperfield, 1850, Dickens coined this term to describe a shiver of horror, writing: 
 
‘She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps’’.
 
This has evolved to become the common phrase we use today when something that scares us ‘gives us the creeps’.

Another one from The Pickwick Papers and a brilliant word, ‘flummoxed’ means to be bewildered by something – and appeared in Dickens’ story in the following passage: 

‘And my ‘pinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don’t prove a alleybi, he’ll be what the Italians call reg’larly flummoxed, and that’s all about it’.

When Dickens named his infamous character Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, 1843, he probably didn’t realise just how embedded the name would become in the English language – with people commonly using ‘a Scrooge’ to describe someone of a stingy nature.