Innovative | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

Ah, hello wordsmiths! You found me in my workshop, coining new words— a little soldering, a little welding, and there you are, a brand new word! Let's take it out of the forge and see what I've made.

Oh, well, this word already exists—it's Innovative. Inovative, it's an adjective; it means coming up with new ideas or approaches, inventive. So, an Innovative idea might require a new approach to a problem. New is important here, and I'll explain when we get into the word's origins.

"In" means in or on; "no" means new from the Latin Novus, and "eight" makes the word into a verb, right? And so that's innovate: to make something new. "If" makes that verb into an adjective—Innovative; a way to describe something as newly invented or newly introduced.

So let's think about that "nove" word part—"noov." How many words can you think of that have that in there? I'll give you 10 seconds and a little music break to think it over.

Okay, meet back here in [Music]. 10! Here's what I came up with: novice— a noun; it means newbie, someone who's a beginner. Novel, which is a noun or an adjective. As a noun, it's a fiction book, right? It's something original and new that hasn't happened before; thus, "novel." That's what the adjective form means too: a novel concept is something wholly new.

And novelty, which means kind of silly new thing—a novelty is trivial, frivolous, goofy. Novelty music is a whole entire genre of very silly music that I love a great deal! If you look closely at the grocery store, you'll see that the section where the ice cream sandwiches are is usually labeled Frozen Novelties.

Wordsmith, I would be so good at inventing Frozen Novelties! Okay, Frozen novelty innovator over here: cherry ice cream between two thin slabs of brownie, but the ice cream part is rolled in chocolate shavings! I could make a mint as an ice cream innovator. A chocolate mint!

All right, let's use Innovative in a sentence: Nick's Innovative machine turns seawater into bananas. They're okay; that's sort of the risky take when you make something new, when you innovate, when you're an innovator who innovates.

It's frankly a miracle that you can turn seawater into fruit. It would be another separate miracle if the resultant fruit tasted good.

All right, so that's Innovative! Let's try the verb form innovate: here at the frozen flavor lab, we're always innovating new kinds of ice cream treats. You know, like frozen chocolate-dipped bananas that taste like the brackish waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

Listen, they can't all be winners! All right, you can learn anything, Dave.