Reality Stars and Basketball Players and Ariana Grande Can’t Stop Saying It. Where Did This Word Come From?

“I just have this, like, effortless comfortability with him that, like, I just love,” a woman named Madison cooed on the latest season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind.

There are many reasons to be confused and repelled by this statement: For one thing, it was said through a wall, because that’s how this particular dating reality show works. Forget about that for a second, and also try to put aside any feelings you have about how people use the word like. That leaves us with comfortability, a word that many people insist isn’t a word at all. The man Madison was talking to, Mason, didn’t seem to mind—“I feel the same with you,” he said back—but some viewers at home took notice. On Reddit, one user said that if one more person on the show said comfortability, they would slap them: “That’s not a word!!!”

I can relate. Sometime in the last year or so, comfortability zoomed past “I resonate with that” to the top of my list of linguistic pet peeves. I took note when Ariana Grande used my least favorite word in December, telling a French journalist, “I think, in today’s society, there’s a comfortability that we shouldn’t have, at all, commenting on others’ looks.” It’s all over the place in sports, too, where a headline might talk about a quarterback’s comfortability with his team’s playbook, or use it in reference to how a basketball player’s season is going. I hear it on TikTok and in podcasts too, but in truth the place I notice it more than anywhere else is on the lips of Madison and Mason’s compatriots on reality television. As in: “Marcus and I just have this connection and this natural comfortability to us,” The Bachelorette’s Jenn Tran said last summer. I’m not the only one to have picked up on this: In a December Vulture recap of an episode of yet another reality show, The Ultimatum, writer Laura Bradley commented that comfortability has become “inescapable” in the dating-show sphere.

But all kinds of dumb things get said on reality TV. What’s so uncomfortable about this locution in particular, to me and, it turns out, lots of others?

“It feels like such a ridiculous word to me,” said Dorian Stuber, an English professor at Hendrix College in Arkansas, who has noticed the dreaded C-word cropping up in his students’ writing over the past year. “I’m just like, What is this? Don’t we already have a perfectly good word that means this?” Stuber is referring to the word comfort, and this is a common knock on comfortability: that it adds unnecessary letters and syllables to a perfectly good word to create a new word that clunkily means the exact same thing as the original one.

“It just sounds ugly, is the primary thing,” said Ashley Fairbanks, a writer and communications professional in San Antonio. Fairbanks said she was recently horrified to hear the word come out of her 13-year-old daughter’s mouth. “I definitely corrected it pretty blatantly when she said it, almost like she swore or something,” she said. “She told me she did not care at all about my opinion, but I haven’t heard her say it again.”

Maybe you haven’t encountered the word at all—this would be especially understandable if you’re not a reality TV watcher. Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks how common words and phrases are in books over time, shows that comfortability has seen a sharp increase over the last decade, but it’s still minuscule when you compare it to, say, comfort. Similarly, Google Trends shows an uptick in searches over that time, but the numbers remain relatively low.

So it’s not that it’s the most dominant language trend—it’s more that you’d think it was, the way it gets under word people’s skin. “I don’t want to be the person who judges language use,” Stuber told me. “But something about this word does kind of set me off a little. And so I’m interested in that about myself.”

While I can’t deny that it has felt to me like comfortability entered the lexicon out of nowhere over the last few years, it has actually been around much longer than that—hundreds of years longer. For a recent radio segment for Michigan Public, University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan answered a listener who wrote in about the rise of comfortability. After pointing out that comfortability sounds less awkward out loud than it might initially look, thanks to people collapsing some of its syllables into “comf-tor-bil-i-ty,” Curzan explained that comfortable originally comes from French and has had its current meaning since the 1700s. For almost as long, its noun form has technically been comfortableness, which in Curzan’s view has a slightly different meaning than comfort. Where comfortability comes in can at least partly be attributed to some larger trends in suffix use over the last few hundred years—suffix trends, who knew!—whereby -ness has been losing out in popularity to -ity.

That explains why someone might choose comfortability over comfortableness—but not why they’d choose it over comfort. Stuber said he’s tried to be open to the idea that there’s a good answer to that. “The grumpy part of me is like, Yeah, hello, we already have a good word. When I’m being more generous, I’m thinking, Well, maybe there is some need that is being addressed by the rise of this word.” He said he raised the question with his students, who offered mixed opinions. “One thing some student said to me was it is a word they might use in writing because it sounds fancy,” he said. “Other students were the opposite. They were like, ‘Oh my God, I would never use it in a paper. I use it maybe if I’m talking to friends or something.’ ”

Adam Aleksic, a linguist who goes by @etymologynerd on TikTok and is the author of the forthcoming book Algospeak, wasn’t sure what people might be trying to communicate with comfortability, but its existence doesn’t bother him. As for why someone might use it over comfort and comfortableness, “I do think it kind of has its own vibe a little bit,” he said. He added that it’s hardly unprecedented for similar clusters of words to exist: “Indentation and dent both mean the exact same thing, but I would use them in different situations,” he said. He also pointed to extra and extraneous, and instant or instantaneous. “It’s very much a common etymological thing that we sometimes add extra what are called morphemes, or parts of a word, even when we don’t actually need to, and they don’t change much about the word,” he said.

If we take seriously the idea that comfortability is filling a niche, one that comfort can’t fill, what is that niche? Nicole Holliday, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, surmised that comfort is already doing a lot, as a word: It can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and people might bypass it for that reason, racking their brains for a word that feels more definitively like a noun. It made sense to her that people might want different words for, say, “the comfort of the 3-point line” versus “the comfort from your cozy sweater.” Comfortability’s constant use on reality TV usually concerns relationships and connections, suggesting a distinction between emotional comfort and physical comfort. But Fairbanks said she also hears the word frequently on TikTok Shop, where it’s used in the context of selling clothes, creating a strange confluence between stretchy pants and feelings.

Maybe it’s not all that surprising that comfortability has become popular in the specific realms it has, reality TV chief among them. Today, “we have more access to video of people speaking casually” than we ever have before, Aleksic pointed out, resulting in a “wealth of informal language being used daily.” As Holliday put it, “There are all these people that need to talk about their feelings on TV. And so they’re just noun-ing adjectives because they’re talking so much. Same thing on TikTok, and the same thing with sports commentators. Announcers aren’t gonna go to the dictionary. Reality TV stars aren’t gonna go to the dictionary. And they shouldn’t, because we all know what they mean.”

If we get the gist, why does comfortability still feel to some of us like a slow-motion tragedy, the next literally happening before our eyes? Why do some modifications of language strike us as clever and innovative and some, like this one, as, well, dumb? Though it isn’t just that it sounds dumb—lots of things sound dumb. I think what really offends us might be that it sounds dumb in the service of trying to sound smart. It always carries with it a whiff of bullshit.

To linguists, being bugged by comfortability isn’t any different or more noble than being bugged by any other new word or language trend. Ultimately, “people hate new words,” Holliday said. “They hate language change, but they really hate language change when they think it’s coming from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down, in society.” Hearing the word in such unsophisticated settings as reality TV and social media might be making us that much more judgmental.

Holliday added, “In this particular case, there’s no reason that it couldn’t have been comfortability 700 years ago. That could be the old form and the new form could be comfortableness. These things are somewhat interchangeable when you are trying to noun an adjective, and so any sort of emotional attachment that somebody has to the old form as opposed to the new form is also only because it’s old. There’s nothing linguistically real there.”

Fellow haters, I know this is hard to hear. If it’s any consolation, linguists aren’t sure whether comfortability will stick around. “We do see this 10- or 20-year increase in comfortability,” but, Holliday said, “it’s totally possible that by 2030 nobody’s ever saying it again. What predicts that is whether it develops a shade of meaning different than comfortableness, which I would argue that it seems to be developing.”

As for Stuber, the professor in Arkansas, he told me he’s been hearing the word a lot since he brought it up in class—mostly because his students have been “relentlessly trolling” him with it: “I’ve received a number of emails that use the word comfortability.” It’s done nothing for his comfort.