One of the regular sections in Spectrum is about new technical terms in English. Every month the author gives 20-30 neologisms that have entered everyday use in the English-speaking world, and in the Russian-speaking one too. I’ll list some of the ones published in the June issue of this magazine.
-ware is one of the most commonly used suffixes. Originally it was used in words such as software — software, and hardware — hardware. The following terms have also become classics: freeware — free software, shareware — shareware (you can try how it works before buying it), and vaporware — announced software that hasn’t yet made it to market. A lot of new words have been formed with this suffix. For example, abandonware — the company that wrote the code went bankrupt, beerware — a program that costs a can of beer for the programmer who developed it, careware — the programmer asks every user of such a program to do something useful or donate something to a charity fund, coasterware — discs with such programs are usually used as coasters, crimeware — programs that steal personal information, phishing programs, or other programs that break the law, heroinware — computer games that are very easy to get hooked on, ransomware — a program encrypts files and extorts money for decrypting them, retroware — a program two or three versions older than the latest version, slideware — an announced program that exists only as PowerPoint slides, terrorware — programs used by terrorists.
The suffix -free is used to indicate the absence or lack of something. For example, fat-free — something fat-free; calorie-free, cholesterol-free, salt-free, and even peanut-free are also known. Among the new ones: content-free — lots of words, but no meaning, fact-free — a scientific paper that is not based on real-world data, office-free — an employee who works from home and uses the internet to communicate with the office.
To denote some strong habit, we use the suffix -aholic (-holic, -oholic). The term alcoholic gave rise to workaholic, foodaholic, chocoholic. In the modern world, people use webaholic, twitterholic (by the way, you can follow me here http://www.twitter.com/obrizan), gameaholics, and even Warcraft-aholic.
Various other suffixes, as well as their use, can be read about in the June issue of Spectrum, published by the IEEE. And what neologisms do you run into?
Update: someone pointed out another important term: peopleware — personnel support, i.e., employees. There is a book of the same name: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.