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The lexicographers found words in Browne because they looked. But when Browne coined words, how did he expect anyone to understand them? Partly by using synonymous doublets: ‘the Lion, a fierce and ferocious Animal’; ‘Therapeutick or curative Physick’; ‘Lachrymatories, or Tear-bottles’.
Many of his new or scarcely used words come from Latin. He took gypsum directly from Latin, as he did belemnites, the fossils. Biped is torn from the Latin bipes, bipedem. Asphaltick is from the Greek asphaltos, used in English since the days of Sir John Mandeville’s imaginary travels in the 14th century. Milton took up Asphaltick 24 years later in Paradise Lost.
What’s striking is not the hundreds of obscure words Browne uses, but how many are now in ordinary use: approximate, aquiline (‘an hooked or Aquiline nose’), cadaverous, causation, coexistence, disruption (meaning ‘bursting asunder’), elevator (though as an ‘ascending chamber’ it came in only in 1853).
He is the OED’s first source for flammability and for inflamabilities. He is the first cited for follicle, hallucination, illustrative, participating, ruminating, selection, transgressive, undulation, variegation, vitreous. For me, the Latin quotations in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy clog the prose, but Browne’s ludic and playful neologisms enrich his.
Also by Dot Wordsworth
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