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.
In the Vinony graph
Within Vinony's link graph, pseudoword is referenced by 58 other articles, and connects out to phonotactics, Jean Berko Gleason and German.
Vinony files it under Cognitive psychology, Experimental psychology and Lexicology.
Its subject is documented across 15 Wikipedia language editions.
~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.