Markedness

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The quality of a word, form or phoneme that is considered to be more complicated, less natural or stranger than the usual form. countable, uncountable

    "Using the word "comedienne" instead of "comedian" can be seen as an example of markedness."

Example

More examples

"Using the word "comedienne" instead of "comedian" can be seen as an example of markedness."

Etymology

From marked + -ness.

Related phrases

markedness constraint

More for "markedness"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.