verse

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Jeff Prucher <jprucher at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> See Brave New Words and the OED SF Citations project for some work on the suffix
> -verse. Note that in both sources, we have been primarily concerned with only
> two of the various issues you raise -- the word "multiverse" and "-verse" used
> to specify a fictional universe (as in Buffyverse, Marvelverse, etc.).

In its current use as a suffix (or what Arnold Zwicky calls a
"libfix"), "-verse" doesn't have to specify a *fictional* universe.
See, e.g., "Googleverse" and "Twitterverse":

http://www.wordspy.com/words/Googleverse.asp
http://www.wordspy.com/words/Twitterverse.asp

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org