Madest Up Word

It is a word that I only really noticed recently.

In the coverage of the women's singles final of this years (2017) Australian Open Tennis the victorious of the Williams' sisters received the rightful accolade of being the most winningest player in the history of the game.

Winningest, it seems to be drived from a combination of winning and best and on first impression an example of urban slang, internet invention and social media abbreviation.

It is actually a bit of an olde worlde term. The Online Etymology Dictionary, an authoritative and credible source  records that winningest first appeared in the written record by 1804 although no actual use of it in any context for that era has been produced to validate this. Perhaps the best evidence of its 19th Century origins could have been its use to describe the crowning of Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor of France in 1804, as in "he was the winningest personality of the post Revolutionary Era".

Of course that was never the case.

Since hearing it in a sporting context the word winningest has crept into many more general interest commentaries and articles that I have caught on the TV, the radio and in the media.

The dictionary establishment that is Merriam-Webster call it a “made-up word” and a “lazy degradation of modern language.” It seems that as many people loathe the use of it as those who just accept it in their daily bulletins and news feeds. Both Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary claim to have traced the word back to the early 1970's and cite,  to support their contention, a report in the Columbia, South Carolina State newspaper which described the sporting prowess of a local team as in the “winningest college basketball team in the nation.”

Since the word appeared , it has been used almost exclusively in the sports pages of the North American press. A writer, educator and blogger, James Harbeck in his long-running blog "The Sesquiotica" eloquently analyses our attitude towards words such as winningest.

"Newness alone isn’t a good reason to find a word immature, though; after all, plenty of much newer words have seamlessly slipped into everyday usage. The resistance to accepting winningest as a “real word” probably comes from its weird morphology and incongruous semantics. We don’t usually slap the superlative -est morpheme onto the -ing morpheme—it seems like a mistake a young child might make—and winningest may be the only English word to feature this odd combination. Sure, present participle forms can serve beautifully as adjectives, but even words like charming and stunning—which we probably use more often as adjectives than as verbs—are compared using more and most rather than the -er and -est suffixes. Yet this semantic mismatch is why winningest has found a niche as a functional word, despite the many reasons it shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t actually mean “most winning,” does it? To be the winningest means to have the most wins or victories, or to have the most success, typically in a sports context. And in that context, it’s unambiguous, succinct. You may wrinkle your nose at a phrase like “the winningest team in the league,” but you’re unlikely to be confused by it, and any other way of expressing the same concept would simply take more syllables"

Wordsmiths and language purists may have an objection  to this “non-word,” but there is no denying that winningest is beginning to take on the rest of the world and pop up in many other spheres of everyday life.

Other words have in a similar way crept into our consciousness such as funner (more fun) and fuller (more full).

You never know we may soon hear such things as eatingest (most tasty), drivingest (proficient at driving), sleepingest (most comfortable bed) and accept them as the norm (normest?)