pseudoword
Sign in to saveAlso known as non-word, logatome, wug word
thumb | right | Cover of the October 1905 issue of Jabberwock: a Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.
~8 min read
Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Characteristics
- Linguistic studies
- Pseudowords and reading ability
- Nonsense syllables
- See also
- References
thumb | right | Cover of the October 1905 issue of Jabberwock: a Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.
Such words lacking a meaning in a certain language or absent in any text corpus or dictionary can be the result of (the interpretation of) a truly random signal, but there will often be an underlying deterministic source, as is the case for examples like jabberwocky and galumph (both coined in a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll), dord (a ghost word published due to a mistake), ciphers, and typos.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “pseudoword” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.