A true wordsmith …

… Coleridge’s way with words | OUPblog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Coleridge was trying to sharpen the meaning of words that had been so blunted by use as to become practically interchangeable. A new word could be tailored specially for the job it had to do, free of the unwanted accrued associations of its alternatives. In ‘Kubla Khan,’ for example, his source (Purchas) might have offered a ‘palace’ with ‘a stately garden,’ but what Coleridge gave us was, for the first time on record, a ‘pleasure dome.’ English already had housemate and yokemate, but when Coleridge advised a young lady about marriage, he formulated, by analogy, the infinitely more important soulmate.