New words tend to be formed in many different ways, for different reasons, and have different origins. A large amount of what we hear and read in our day–to-day life are nonce formations (words made up on the spot), many not to be uttered by the same person ever again (Bauer, 2006:46). What makes them stay in our vocabulary or be forgotten? By investigating eight different neologisms from the 1960s and their occurrences in two newspapers, the American TIME magazine and the British The Times (London), from the 1960s until 2006, this question is examined on a small scale. The morphological background of these words is also investigated. Some words have constantly increased in frequency up until today, some have barely not been used at all since the time of coinage, and some have decreased in usage but are still used on a smaller scale. The differences in frequency development can be analysed by the help of different factors concerning popularity, the FUDGE factors (Metcalf, 2002). What has been found in this study is that the most important factor is the one concerning endurance of the concept of the word. Also, all the words seem to be on the same level of establishment concerning word formation, which is the level of institutionalization. Studying only these eight neologisms, The US magazine tends to have a concentration of higher frequencies in the first half of the time span, and the British newspaper seems to have higher frequencies of usage in the later half of the time span.