Flummox Sentence Examples

When you think of massively popular celebrities, you probably don’t think of Charles Dickens. But he was a literary rock star who enjoyed an unusual amount of popularity during his lifetime by appealing to a mass readership with unique turns-of-phrase and British slang words. His work was so popular that these words (many of which he invented) made their way from slang into proper English vocabulary, and even into our modern speech and writing.

What do a mentor, a robot, and syphilis have in common? This isn’t the start of some kind of weird, politically incorrect joke: These are all words invented and popularized by authors. These now-common words are just a few of the words that became part of our daily speech after appearing in a famous literary work. Some come right from a book’s title, while others may surprise you.