Hey sci-fi and fantasy writers, it's OK to put words like Aleahji'Quadkta or whatever into your stories. But just stringing semi-random letters together will only take you so far. So, one way to make up words. A Thread.

This isn't for making "untranslated" words. The best way to do that is pull a tolkien and actually make up your language. This is a way to make words that "sound" like they fit into the language of your text (for the purposes of this thread, we'll assume english).

The *very* first thing you need to do is decide how common this word is. It is extremely rare for a word people have to say lot to be super long and complicated. If you're naming a species of animal in every city and people see all the time, it's NOT going to be long as fuck.

Common words, especially nouns, are short and simple. Dog, Rat, Bug, Fly, Mouse, Chair, House, Hut, Plow, Food. So if we're naming a common pest, tool, food, or the like, let's keep it short and sweet. Max of two syllables.

OK, pick an english word either tangentially related to your target, or unrelated at all. Example: We're naming a small flying pest. So I'm going to avoid words like fly, gnat, bug. Staying close to related words sounds weird, just use the original if you want to.

Let's use "mover". It's a good word, but we need to make a new one out of it. We do this by changing consonants, but we don't want to do that randomly. Take M, make that M sound with your mouth. Think about what other sounds you can make with similar shapes of your mouth.

M translates well to B and P. Stick to familiar sounds. That would give us "bover" and "pover". Probably better to write those first vowels as "oo" to more closely reflect the closed back rounded vowel. "boover" and "poover".

We lucked out here because we didn't slam into a real english word. So we could stop here. Or we can do the same for the other consonants. If we unvoice the "V" it becomes an "F" either "boofer" or "poofer". "R" is variable, as an american, my "R" actually closer to "ʃ" than "l"

But for a lot of english speakers, "L" is a decent replacement for "R". (I'd recommend avoiding "ʃ" even though its more common than you think.) But 'poofel' sounds pretty good. Definitely sounds "new" without sounding "alien"

You CAN mess with vowels too, although that's not my first choice (those are more variable between accents and dialects). A word like Dog can move up and forward mouth to Dig or up and back to Doog. Although there are fewer distinguishable vowels so you'll run out soon.

Another example: Let's say we need a word for hobbits, in english, to describe their foot hair. We'll want one or two syllables, maybe three on the outside. Lets start with "elbow". That L (a voiced voice lateral alveolar approximate) could swap to a plosive. That makes "edbow"

Let's move that B from a plosive to the nasal, "edmow". To me, that sounds good but looks a little weird. But the good news there is english spelling is made up "edmough" looks better and will probably be pronounced correctly on sight.

Final trick for this method is to cut or add consonants. You can usually do this without breaking things too badly. In the examples above, you could make 'poofel' into "oofel" (or oofle, spelling is made up remember) or made edmough to nedmough or bedmough.

Is this the only way to go about making words? No way, but it's a relatively algorythmic way to make new words that still sound and feel like english.

Hint, this works great for names too.