The children's books of Dr. Seuss abound in words that the author invented. Inspection shows that these coinages are not arbitrary, raising the challenge of specifying the linguistic basis on which they were created. Drawing evidence from regression analyses covering the full set of Seuss coinages, I note several patterns, which include coinages that are phonotactically ill-formed, coinages meant to sound German and coinages that assist compliance with the meter. But the primary coinage principle for Seuss appears to have been to use words that include phonesthemes (Firth 1930), small quasi-morphemic sequences affiliated with vague meanings. For instance, the coinage Snumm contains two phonesthemes identified in earlier research, [sn-] and [-ʌm]. Concerning phonesthemes in general, I assert their affiliation with vernacular style, and suggest that phonesthemes can be identified in words purely from their stylistic effect, even when the affiliated meaning is absent. This is true, I argue, both for Seuss’s coinages and for the existing vocabulary.

苏斯博士的儿童读物中充斥着作者发明的文字。检查表明，这些造词不是任意的，这就提出了具体说明它们创建的语言基础的挑战。从涵盖全套苏斯造币的回归分析中提取证据，我注意到了几种模式，其中包括发音错误的造币、听起来像德语的造币和有助于遵守米制的造币。但苏斯的主要造词原则似乎是使用包含音位主题的词（Firth 1930），与模糊含义相关的小型准词素序列。例如，造币Snumm包含早期研究中确定的两个音素主题，[sn-] 和 [-ʌm]。关于一般的音位主题，我断言它们与白话风格有联系，并建议即使在没有相关含义的情况下，也可以纯粹从它们的文体效果来识别音位主题。我认为，这对于苏斯的造词和现有词汇都是正确的。