“If you know the origin of a word, everything can be more clearly comprehended”, said the 6th Century scholar Isidore of Seville. While the journey of most words doesn’t leave traceable trails, there is an elite class of verbal inventions whose exact dates of initial utterance have been carefully recorded.

If we talk about Twitter, we immediately think of the popular social media. But ‘Twitter’, or ‘twiterith’ as it was initially crafted, was first used by the Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the second half of the 14th century. ‘Panorama’ lets us dream of wide, mountain-top vistas and boundless horizons, but the word entered the world’s lexicon around 1789 to define an entirely confined experience: a cylindrical painting that imprisons its audience – an indoor visual contraption devised by the Irish artist Robert Barker.

It’s hard to believe that no one had ever ‘visualised’ anything before 1817, but that’s the year the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the word in his philosophical confession Biographia Literaria. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes to female writers the first usage of such words as ‘outsider’ (to Jane Austen in 1800) and ‘muggle’ (to J K Rowling in her 1997 book Harry Potter).

Discover more of the words who changed the way we think on BBC Culture and watch the video