A Perfectly Cromulent Word: Embiggen at Thirty
In February 1996, The Simpsons aired “Lisa the Iconoclast” (season 7, episode 16). Lisa is writing a bicentennial essay on Springfield's founder, Jebediah Springfield, whose motto the town treats as scripture:
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
In a later scene one teacher says she had never heard the word embiggen until she moved to Springfield, and another replies that it's a perfectly cromulent word. That is the whole joke. Two words that sound like they've always existed, one vouching for the other.
Both words were invented on purpose. Writer Dan Greaney is credited with embiggen and David X. Cohen with cromulent. The episode's writing credit goes to Jonathan Collier.
The word already had a past
Embiggen turns out not to be new. In 1884 a writer named C.A. Ward, in the British journal Notes and Queries, wrote of people who magnified things, “to make great or embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly.” Ward was coining an ugly verb to make a point about coining verbs. The Oxford English Dictionary lists that as the earliest evidence, 112 years before the episode. Wordsmith calls Greaney's 1996 coinage independent: the same word, invented twice.
From joke to dictionary
It took twenty-two years. On March 5, 2018, Merriam-Webster announced it was adding embiggen as one of 850 new words, and the OED added it the same year. Along the way the word turned up in a 2007 physics paper, in online publications and in a Ms. Marvel comic. Cromulent has since made it in too.
The retcon
The episode is about exactly this. Lisa discovers that Jebediah Springfield was really Hans Sprungfeld, a pirate who tried to assassinate George Washington in 1796. She proves it, then decides to leave the legend alone because it does the town more good than the truth would. The motto stays on the wall.
The word got the same treatment in reverse. A fake motto from a fake founder acquired a real history after the fact, and the 1884 citation is what turned a writers' room joke into an entry with a lineage. Retconning is what we call it when the record gets adjusted so the present makes sense. It can be honest, like finding a real 1884 page, or it can be a story invented because it sounds right.
Why it matters in 2026
This February was the episode's thirtieth anniversary, and the pipeline it shows is still how language works. Someone coins a word, people repeat it because it's useful or funny, publications pick it up, and dictionaries record what already happened. Dictionaries follow use. They don't grant permission.
What has changed is how cheap it is to backfill a history. A plausible origin story for any word, phrase or tradition can now be produced in seconds, and it will sound as confident as the real one. The embiggen story is a useful check because every piece of it can be verified: the air date, the credits, and a scanned page of an 1884 journal. If an origin story has nothing like that behind it, treat it as a joke of its own.
Even my sources disagreed. One article I read put the episode in 1997. Wikipedia and Wordsmith both say 1996, and the date is February 18, 1996.
Sources
- Lisa the Iconoclast (Wikipedia): air date, credits, plot, dictionary additions
- A.Word.A.Day: embiggen: the 1884 Notes and Queries citation and Greaney’s independent coinage
- Mental Floss: Merriam-Webster’s March 2018 announcement