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For example, "recidivistic" can be found in Merriam-Webster as an adjective derivative of recidivist.

How do I know if "recidivistically" is adverb form of "recidivistic"? It is not listed in Merriam-Webster, but it can be Googled.

tchrist
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Ben
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    You're right that dictionaries and reference works can't be expected to list every possible derivative of a word; so sometimes your only choice is to see if other people use the word, and if so, which people, and how frequently, and in what contexts. This is the job of corpora. My personal favorite corpus is the COCA, but Google Books, though not as feature rich or as dedicated a research tool, can't be beat for convenience (or probably corpus size?). – Dan Bron Jul 30 '15 at 01:20
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    I’m afraid this all comes back to the unanswerable question of “What’s a ‘word’, anyway?”. – tchrist Jul 30 '15 at 01:38
  • So there is no authority that I can refer to and people can just "make up" words based on it's popularity? – Ben Jul 30 '15 at 01:49
  • Google ngrams shows that the fairly obcure word anagogic (of Greek etymology) is about 100x as widely used as recidivistically, for example (see https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=recidivistically%2C+anagogic&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crecidivistically%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Canagogic%3B%2Cc0). However, recidivistic is almost on par with anagogic. On a purely empirical basis, I would say recidivistically is not a proper word. – Marconius Jul 30 '15 at 02:06
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    @Kuromusha Of course there is no “authority”! Where do you think words come from in the first place? People make stuff up. Furthermore, popularity is its own metric. But using derivational morphology or even creating new words out of established roots in such a way that an educated speaker knows what it means despite never having seen it before is no great trick: it happens daily. More to the point, -ly is fully productive so it always makes a “word”, even if you are the first to do so. (But you aren’t.) – tchrist Jul 30 '15 at 02:08
  • @tchrist You shouldn't say "of course there is no `authority'!" Many languages do have regulatory bodies. – Azor Ahai -him- Sep 28 '15 at 21:22
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    @Press But the vast majority of those bodies are sane enough to limit their influence to official, usually written, use of a standardised language. Very few have the megalomanic audacity to claim any influence over the actual, spoken language itself. China (where I suspect the asker is from, based on their user name on [japanese.se]) is one of those few countries that keep trying to use official bodies to regulate how people speak in their daily lives, but it is of course entirely futile even there. So as far as the spoken language is concerned, “of course” is not so far out. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 28 '15 at 21:40
  • I only meant that for a speaker of a language with a regulatory body, like Chinese or French, might be surprised to find that there is no such group for English. "Of course" implies a certain obviousness that might not be there for some people. – Azor Ahai -him- Sep 28 '15 at 22:44

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In formal contexts, you'll want to stick with what you find in the dictionary as much as possible.

Clarification:

How do I know if xxx is [a word]? It is not listed in Merriam-Webster, but it can be Googled.

For an informal context, you can use googlability, or even your own creativity and logic, to determine if you've dreamed up an acceptable form; but for a formal context, check with a couple of dictionaries. If your fantasy word isn't in any of them, rewrite your sentence.

aparente001
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    This doesn't answer the question. – curiousdannii Jul 30 '15 at 08:40
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    I'm not sure I agree. There are plenty of formal words as well that are not in the dictionary. – herisson Jul 30 '15 at 18:24
  • @sumelic How would you answer the question, then? In Scrabble, you have to just pick a dictionary, arbitrarily if you must, and stick to it consistently. Things can get too time-consuming if you allow yourself to agonize over each gray-area word. – aparente001 Jul 31 '15 at 04:08
  • Well, I didn't answer the question myself because I'm not sure how to answer; I'd have to take some time to think about it. Dan Bron mentioned looking at corpora; that can be a good strategy. Also, even within "formal contexts," there might be specialized terminology that doesn't show up in ordinary dictionaries. To give an example from linguistics, the word "irrealis." I'd imagine there are similar words in other fields, such as programming or the arts. http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12291/is-irrealis-not-an-official-word/12292#12292 – herisson Jul 31 '15 at 04:16