pseudoword

English

Etymology

From pseudo- +‎ word.

Noun

pseudoword (plural pseudowords)

1. (linguistics) A unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon; a non-word whose nonexistence is merely an accidental gap.
   • 2011, R. Harald Baayen, Robert Schreuder, Morphological Structure in Language Processing, page 186:

     In Experiment 1, pseudowords made up of Italian derivational suffixes of various frequencies and meaningless pseudoroots were contrasted to pseudowords in which the same pseudoroots were combined with control orthographically legal final sequences.

Synonyms

• wug word

Hypernyms

• nonword, non-word

Related terms

• nonce word, nonsense word, pseudoletter

Translations

unit

• Catalan: logàtom m
• Dutch: logatoom (nl) n
• Esperanto: pseŭdovorto
• French: pseudo-mot m
• German: Logatom n
• Greek: ψευδολέξη (el) f (psevdoléxi)
• Hebrew: מילת תפל (he) (milat tefel)
• Japanese: 擬似語 (gijigo)
• Korean: 유사 비단어 (yusa bidaneo)
• Polish: logatom m
• Thai: ศัพท์เทียม (sàp tiam)